Don Tapscott: Why the Pandemic World Will Be Transformed by Blockchain Tech

The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper economic, political, and technological consequences of the pandemic. It’s our new daily podcast trying to make longterm sense out of the chaos of today’s global crisis.

On today’s episode, Don Tapscott, author of Supply Chain Revolution: How Blockchain Technology Is Transforming the Global Flow of Assets, discusses how blockchain technology is changing our world right now.

From the episode:

Don Tapscott: The pandemic has revealed all kinds of severe limitations in our institutions, our leaders, and donor systems as well. We at the Blockchain Research Institute have been doing a number of projects related to blockchain and pandemics, and it seems like there are a number of big opportunities but also some pretty interesting initiatives that are underway. They fall in a bunch of areas. A big one has to do with data.

I mean, the reason that we have this pandemic is because of data or lack thereof. We don’t have the early warning systems with health care data, and health care data is all locked up in silos. So if we each had our own portable sovereign health care record, it’s capturing real-time information as it can. Today, our heart rate, for that matter, our temperature, our location, and so on. Then built into that cell sovereign record, we could have agreements with governments, epidemiologists, clinicians, and so on. Aggregate and summary-anonymized information could be collected to spot a pandemic before it took off and to better manage it. That’s just one of the areas that we’re looking at.

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Don Tapscott is one of the world’s leading authorities on the impact of technology on business and society. He has authored 16 books, including Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, which has been translated into over 25 languages. Don’s most recent book was co-authored with his son, Alex Tapscott. Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin and Other Cryptocurrencies Is Changing the World was published in May 2016 and is, according to Harvard Business School’s Clay Christensen, “the book, literally, on how to survive and thrive in this next wave of technology-driven disruption.” In 2017, Don and Alex co-founded the Blockchain Research Institute, whose 80+ projects are the definitive investigation into blockchain strategy, use cases, implementation challenges and organizational transformations. Don is a member of the Order of Canada and is ranked the second most influential Management Thinker and the top Digital Thinker in the world by Thinkers50.