Welcome to 2018!
We’ll be participating in a few key events soon that we wanted to let you know about. You’re welcome to join us at these events!
IAOIP InnovaCon 2018
The signature innovation conference of the International Association of Innovation Professionals is taking place this year in Washington DC February 27 – March 1. Click here for more information.
Half Day Scenario Planning Workshop
Langdon Morris will be leading a 1/2 day workshop on Scenario Planning on February 27. The session will be fully participatory, with the intent that the participants will learn how to apply this exceptionally useful process by doing it.
Scenario Planning is a proven technique for examining possible future states of society and the economy in situations of high uncertainty and turbulence, such as we are experiencing today. The goal of this approach is not to predict the future, which is in any case impossible, but rather to model possible and plausible futures, and then to discover the best strategic actions that an organization can take to pro-actively address the future. The technique focuses on identifying the forces that are driving change, and then on modeling their interactions.
It has proven to extremely valuable for all types of organizations, both as a process of gaining strategic insight, and as a means of developing greater depth of expertise in strategy, management, and leadership. During the workshop the participants will learn the technique by practicing the technique. Working in teams, participants will create scenarios and then model the strategic consequences, achieving thereby a deep understanding of the driving forces and many possible future states. This will help enormously in developing their capacity to anticipate the future and to undertake proactive strategic initiatives in their organizations.
Langdon will also give a brief talk the following day on Innovation and the Blockchain. Here’s the blurb:
Driving Innovation with Blockchain: Practical Applications
The blockchain is a powerful innovation tool across the entire economy, as it provides new mechanisms to establish and validate trust and reputation, and to facilitate transactions. It marks a potentially significant shift in the structure of the economy, one likely to have massive implications for everyone and every organization involved in finance and capital formation, which in the end is just about everyone. This presents two notable difficulties. First, hardly anyone actually understands what a blockchain is, how it’s created, or why it’s useful, and second, its short and medium and long term implications are elusive. In this talk, Langdon Morris will share insights from the new book “Financing Revolution” which explores many of the ways that innovative blockchain based technologies could indeed fundamentally alter the structure of the economy. This is likely to be essential knowledge for all innovators and would-be innovators.
Legal Week East 2018
Langdon will also be delivering a talk at Legal Week East, January 30 – February 1 in New York City.
Innovation, New Technologies, Corporations, and the Law Profession
Innovation has become increasingly important to corporate and government organizations as technology advances and markets become globalized and more competitive. However, as innovation pushes into new realms, this brings with it significant challenges from a legal perspective, because many of the emerging advances create new areas where there are no legal precedents. This means lots of opportunities, but also lots of potential liabilities. How does society deal with the many legal issues around technologies such as self-driving cars, drones, robots, robotic surgeons, advanced genetic engineering, clones, etc., etc.? How can law firms work effectively with clients such as these?
In this presentation, innovation expert Langdon Morris will highlight some of the key themes and questions regarding the process and results of innovation on the leading edge of change, and explain these issues from the perspective of innovative corporations that are working to bring new products and services to market that evoke new areas of law. The goal is to help legal professionals to better understand how their clients are thinking about and managing innovation in their research and development labs, and to suggest ways that law firms can work as effective partners with the would-be innovators to enhance their efforts.
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