Five Blockchain Challenges to Move the Social Impact Needle

In so many ways, this summer season is an unforgettable one for our community, especially as just a week ago we cheered from the stands watching the final pitches of our first hackathon, full of anticipation for what’s next for Blockchain Israel.

"Our understanding of blockchain technologies is still in its genesis, but we think it could reshape capitalism and societies shared values. It could also drive the next wave of innovation and productivity growth in the global economy, providing new understandings of the immense human needs to be met, large new markets to be served, and the internal costs of social deficits — as well as the competitive advantages available from addressing them."

We believe that startups and innovation can help humanity, serve societies and emerging technologies will transform experiences. But it is also true to mention that economic and social objectives have long been seen as distinct and often competing: in the emerging era of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency economy it is a false dichotomy.

Embedding a Social Impact Purpose through Blockchain Technologies

Global organisations and corporations are making significant progress in embedding large-scale social impact efforts in their developments, including acquisitions of startups (mostly focused on data management, strategic investments, KPIs, cross-channels and decision paths), and try to seriously consider solving major social problems in profitable ways to become their "raison d’être". As a natural convergence of interests, they realise that social issues present both daunting constraints to their operations and vast opportunities for growth. Most of them have realistically awakened to that fact but many are struggling to implement the social impact concept.

We have studied for more than 12 months, companies that innovate to create scalable models for delivering social benefits and business value: we have found that these companies consistently rely on five mutually reinforcing challenges.

These are also the challenges that society has left behind, the most deeply rooted and maybe the most intractable chains:

[+] Learn more: on Blockchain for Social Impact Hackathon by Blockchain Israel

A big part of the gaps we noticed while creating the tracks lies with specific global organisations and corporations and the way they address their own challenges, which remain untapped and outdated narrow approach to value creation.

Shared value in the value chain

"Blockchain for Social Impact" represents one of the most increasing perspective in a world of open, knowledge-based competition.

Opportunities to create shared value arise because societal problems can create economic costs in organisations and social enterprises value chains. We need to act with collective responsibilities to help keep the world safe and create more cross-industry initiatives by implementing advanced tools and guidance so everyone can leverage. That is why we also choose to set up the the Blockchain for Social Impact Hackathon to help us defining some of the social needs.

Yet during the follow up process we noticed many projects have failed to translate those gains into sustainable profitability and scalability as traditional value chains inevitably affect - and are inversely affected by - numerous societal issues:

1. Competitive context has always been important to organisations' strategies - including the World Economic Forum Initiative * - and many other social enterprises. But We all know how much our society suffered to reach consensus and technological progress remains distributed by nature.
2. Global corporations make a virtue of provenance as new tracking capabilities allow them to load every detail of the production process onto records integrated into the enterprise resource planning systems **: item-level tagging allows accounting and costing to be tuned.
3. Although it is a fairly simple to make most of the existing supply chains transparent through online-verification codes, the technological efforts required can inhibit widespread adoption, secure tagging and labelling, using blockchain-based infrastructures *** to address product counterfeiting.

Modelling the global markets issues

After defining our challenges and estimating the process and social value, we formalised our arguments within the context of a few main global markets issues that helped us providing models that capture several of the key features of the global emerging markets before and after the embedding blockchain technologies.

For example, for the social responsibility challenge we thought about an integrated model to explain how social impact on performance has important implications for enterprises, communities, countries, and why the significance of this issue cannot be ignored.

• Providing working capital to the participants of the value chain (manufacturers and suppliers), easing transitions through crypto assets for many businesses.
• Aligning processes to provide predictive data-rich models and clear guidelines to the customers (KYC).
• Developing corporate and institutional business intelligence data tools on cryptocurrency owners (including education plans, proper lingo) while launching growing social platforms and structured marketplaces.
• Strengthening industry-specific marketing channels to increase community engagement (platform adoption and market penetration) for a significant period, resulting on maximizing the value per transaction and improving ROI.

Towards education

The hyper-evolution of technology can also solve profound social impact causes, including the most anchored issues of our society. The Blockchain for Social Impact Initiative is designed to help social entrepreneurs on their way whose innovative blockchain-based solutions are making significant impact locally and globally.

Decentralization of data storage and ownership promises to fundamentally shift the status quo: we can already assist to global corporations and organizations cutting out intermediaries and replace their "centralized platforms" with token-based systems and integrate peer-to-peer transactions executed via “smart contracts". But way beyond the legal concerns and the current hype many are looking forward to blockchain technology crosshair integration.

For this, the whole team at Blockchain Israel is working hard on creating new plans to educate more entrepreneurs, unleash the creative potential in every developers and help companies exploit continuous improvement.

And this is just the beginning. Welcome to the 21 era.

Thank you and congratulations to the winning teams and all the participants.

It happened this past week at Tel Aviv: 30 hours, 9 teams, 16 mentors, 6 speakers, 6 judges, 8 languages, 5 challenges, 42 amazing (selected) participants. One community.

Thank you to our sponsor Microsoft Israel, IBM Israel, Hertzog Fox Neeman and all our partners, our supportive friends at TLV starters, our featured startups and all our priceless people.

Thank you to GRTH for the first winning prize, to TFT for the second winning prize and Malta Blockchain Summit for the third prizes.

All the participants will get the benefit to be the first members in our education program 21.

Check out "Blockchain for Social Impact" by Blockchain Israel ed. 2018 album.

Blockchain Israel is coordinating educational events, hackathons and community support for entrepreneurs, engineers and developers in Israel and soon, across the world.

Some resources

* Trustworthy Data Innovation: "Six Shared Global Outcomes to Achieve a Sustainable, Inclusive and Trustworthy Digital World" by the World Economic Forum.

** Blockchain Workbench by Microsoft Azure, read more here.

*** Blockchain business networks by IBM: Hyperledger Fabric (framework) and Hyperledger Composer (tool), read more here.

A great post by David Suter, one of our featured Board Advior: "Four high school girls win Blockchain for Social Impact Hackathon"