Digital Transformation: Pre and Post Covid-19

with Jim Balsillie

Aug 20, 2020 | 12:00 – 13:00 Download .ics

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The rise of the Knowledge Based Economy and subsequent Data Driven Economy has created a new world in which the basis of wealth and power is derived from control of these intangible assets, alongside creating a new kind of social and political space in which both our public and private spheres are technologically reshaped. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated these transformations that permeate our world and has amplified their effects.

Over the past three decades, a new global rule-of-law framework has been forged to govern the way that innovation is incentivized and the way that gains from innovation are captured and distributed. The development of this framework was motivated first by the rise of the knowledge-based economy (KBE), in which the strategic focus of business shifted to generating and controlling traditional intellectual property (IP) assets, such as patents and copyrights. The framework has been further elaborated to reflect the emergence of the data-driven economy (DDE), in which the strategic focus of business shifted increasingly to generating and controlling data assets as well as the valuable intellectual property developed on top of these data assets through application of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Join INET Co-Founder Jim Balsillie for a discussion on both the structure of this transformation and on potential policy solutions to manage its effects.

Jim Balsillie is the former Chairman and co-CEO of Research In Motion (BlackBerry). His private investment office includes global and domestic technology investments and was part of the consortium that recently purchased the Canadian space technology leader MDA. He is the co-founder of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Council of Canadian Innovators, the Centre for International Governance Innovation, the Centre for Digital Rights and the CIO Strategy Council. He currently chairs the boards of CCI, CIGI, and co-Chairs CIOSC. He is also the founder of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Arctic Research Foundation; a member of the Board of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Advisory Board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre; an Honorary Captain of the Royal Canadian Navy and an Advisor to Canada School of Public Policy. His awards include: several honorary degrees, Mobile World Congress Lifetime Achievement Award, India’s Priyadarshini Academy Global Award, Canadian Business Hall of Fame, Time Magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People and three times Barron’s list of “World’s Top CEOs.”

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