 Good morning all. I would really just like to give you a big thank you for coming here, but not only that, I'd like to take a step back and say where did I start with my research at the end of the 90s when I was a doctoral student at the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden. I was fascinated by online communities. Since then, you have inspired me in my research and I've done research on firm sponsored open source software communities. I've worked at Open Simulator, trying to understand the rise of virtual worlds, blockchain, et cetera. But about four years ago, I decided that I love all this soft stuff but I'd really like to really understand how software and so on can influence the hard world. What's going on with like the physical things? And so I moved to the Chalmers University of Technology, an engineering university. And since then I've been putting into practice both my research as an academic, but also as an entrepreneur. So today I'd like to take you a little bit through some of my research as well as some of my work as an entrepreneur. And I always, you know, I've been inspired by you. Whenever I start a presentation, I always say steal with pride, no reason to reinvent the wheel. So if you see anything here, feel free to use it, take it, do whatever you want with it. You don't need to ask me. Just if it provides some type of value, then please use it. Let's get started. This is the question that really drives me. I'm trying to understand the future. How do we make decisions about the future? Whether it's a new product, a new service, a new market to go into, my own skillset. It's very difficult because we really only have knowledge about the past, don't we? And with the increasing level of uncertainty and so on, it's very difficult to really see where are we going? And what we know is a little piece, what we know we don't know, somewhat, yeah, bigger, but what we don't know we don't even know. What's hiding under the surface? What is out there? How might that influence the future? I mean, just think back a couple of years ago with COVID, how few organizations have really thought through a scenario of, say, a pandemic. We are very bad at discussing at a collective level what the future might hold. And so I work a lot with scenario thinking and trying to help organizations and individuals think about the future. Now, I love technology. So when we look at these six trends influencing the future, I always get stuck in the technology bubble because I love technology. What does the future look like? But there are five other ones that are extremely important, these other forces that are very much influencing the future of value creation. And just think about when I started my research in the end of the 90s, this was called the PEST model. Then it became steep. Now it's PESTEL, where environmental and legal have come along. Huge issues. I mean, just yesterday I was speaking with one of my colleagues at Ocean Data Factory talking about how they didn't really want to release the software that they've been working on because they were a little bit afraid of how, say, some militaries might use this. So we have lots of different issues that are influencing the future. This is a tool you can use. Think about your own networks. What do they look like? Birds of the feather flock together. We tend to network with people who are very similar to ourselves, who have the share of the same values, the same views of the future. To get out and really explore the future, we need to build many different bridges over many different boundaries, whether it's hierarchical, organizational, demographic, cultural, you name it, try to build those bridges. And when you're doing it, try to get out of your, say, technology bubble and speak to someone at a local county office or a researcher at the university studying, say, the Gen Zers. Bring this discussion up. But why I do this too is I'm also thinking very much about what might the future look like? Here I am in 2012. I don't know if any of you recognize this, Second Life. We built an island in Second Life for the Stockholm School of Economics. My avatar there is the one in pink. I'm interviewing the Open Simulator core group. Fascinating. At this time, I thought, yeah, we're gonna be doing so much in virtual worlds. This was 10 years ago. Now we've received this kind of revival. And this is one reason for also getting out of your bubble, right? Because we tend to think, yeah, things are gonna happen so fast in the span of two years, but they don't. And we also tend to underestimate what might happen in 10. So we need to break out and question and so on. So while this might be one view of the future or a lot of the activity and value creation is going on in these worlds, I'm also seeing other trends saying maybe it's about pulling back and going circular and self-sustaining small physical communities. This is another, say, view of the world. Where we see these self-sustaining communities, you have tele-everything, right? You can 3D print food. You can recycle things and create new products with your 3D printers. You have access to medicine, telemedicine, right? Telehealth, access to work, education, and so on. When I look at this picture, I question, what does that mean for different industries? What happens to the automobile industry in such a scenario? Do we need cars? What might they look like? Maybe it's all about drones. But are these like self-sustaining communities, circular communities locally? Or is there another scenario where perhaps we've created these global village networks where we see the transfer of knowledge across the world to different communities? Maybe we have these nice tele-drones or whatever these fancy drones taking us from one place to another. Who knows? I sit on the board of Luftfahrtswache, which is kind of like the air security, I'm not sure how, federal aviation authority type thing. Fascinating, discussing, what's going on with drones? Where are we going in terms of that? Now, while these are rosy pictures, we also have a tremendous number of challenges, don't we? We've lived in a world in the past few decades of a take, make, waste mentality, right? This linear economy. Does anybody know what this is? You can scream it out. What is this? What do you think? It's clothes. These are our clothes in Ghana. This is a pile of clothes. Between the year 2000 and 2014, the amount of clothes produced in the world doubled. It's supposed to continue to increase. Where do things go? They end up in places like this, in Africa, in South America, and it's not just clothes. It's electronics. It's all our dishwashers and whatever ending up in these trash piles. What are those cows eating? Eating the clothes. So this is a huge issue. How can we work with reducing consumption, with reducing waste? You see that like, generally speaking, 30% of anything that's produced never even gets to market. And then of course we have the whole issue of plastic going into the ocean. Where it's something like, I keep, every time I go look at the number, it's increasing. So I'm like 12.7 million tons going in every year to the ocean. And where is this ending up? Well, we've now found out it's ending up in our blood and our lungs. Microplastics. This is one of the issues that we have been working with at Ocean Data Factory. Trying to see how can we actually detect microplastics in the ocean? Because now you have to take samples and then bring it back and then do some analysis. This is a huge area. There are so many challenges related to the ocean, just waiting for someone to take them on. So while we have this already, what about looking into the future and other scenarios? What is this? Anybody know? Where are we going in terms of electrification? Where does all the, that goes into a battery come from? This is a lithium mine in Peru. We don't even really understand what's happening in terms of the requirement for batteries. Where are the materials coming from and what happens with them afterwards? This is a huge environmental issue. The runoff from these goes into the water supply. Not only that, it uses a tremendous amount of water for producing lithium. So this is just at the beginning. We need to take a step back and take a holistic perspective of what we're doing as we move forward, developing technologies. Because this is only one aspect, right? As we're beginning to see the political sphere, remember we had the pastel, you political forces that are actually going after the struggle for natural resources, geopolitics. And so there's a lot of discussion about deep sea mining. We know nothing about what this might release. This is also a huge challenge. We work with the spread of invasive species. Can we use artificial intelligence to enable us to predict the spread of an invasive species? Whether it's a small killer shrimp, for example, or some organism that is at the bottom of the ocean, very deep, it's been under there for a million years. It gets released by one of these mining machines. And then where will it go? Can we predict that? What does that mean? So we have lots and lots of challenges, fun times, because this is challenging. I mean, our research, right, on open source software community shows that those are in the core, right? They're the ones who love that challenge. Take it on and show that they can, wow, make a difference. So these are some scenarios. And I sure don't want our world to end up like this, where on the left-hand side, this is a project. Let's create a city on top of a great global garbage patch. Yeah, and burn up all that trash out there. Who wants to live there? Or the Blade Runner picture where science fiction becomes science fact. I was in France this summer and it looked like that. I was right in the middle of the fires. So my question to you then is, who creates the future, right? Who creates the future? I don't hear anything. Yeah, we all do, right? We're the ones who create the future, but we have to do it together too, right? We, these challenges are so huge, we have to take them on together with others. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my own personal journey doing this, working with others. This picture is taken in Peniche, Portugal. It's about one hour north of Lisbon. I went there with my son. We wanted to surf, get out of the cold, dark north, and we end up in Peniche. Now my son is my reverse mentor. He's 27 right now. This was about four years ago. He's challenging me all the time. Mom, why do you do it that way? Come on, think differently. You're, yeah, what are you doing? Always provoking me, but it's great because I do. I question my own assumptions, which is so important. So I also encourage all of those of you who, to get a reverse mentor, to be a reverse mentor, someone who's seeing the world from a different light from the younger generations. So when we were there, one line came back to me, and that was Ted Castronova, who was one of the researchers we worked with, and wrote a chapter, the introduction to our book on virtual worlds in 2013. And he said, when he looks at a photograph, he doesn't focus on the people in the front. He looks at the back. He says, who are the people in the back of the photograph? What does their life look like? And what might it look like in the future? So my son and I were talking. What does this happen in terms of, for this community, digitalization, robotics, AI, automation, 3D printing, how is this coastal community working with these issues today? And of course, this is a coastal community. And we became more and more curious, and he said, yeah, let's create a tech hub and let's work together about this. And I'll do it in a few years, and my son says, no, no, no, mom, let's do it now. I was like, I can't do it now. I'm working, I've got my, I just changed to a new university. No, no, no, let's do it now. I said, okay, why not? Let's do it now. So we ended up finding a warehouse, which we actually bought from the father of a fisherman who we met in a motorcycle club, midnight on a Saturday, ventured in out of the blue, started speaking with Luis Santana, and he told us all about the plight of coastal communities where you really move from an area where you're one of the richest cities in the world to one of the poorest regions. 90% of the stock in the ocean is gone, it's not been fished out. Tremendous issues. And we think, what can we do to actually enable this? Is there something? Because we see there is a bit of a broken economic model. Do we take a step back and say, no? Or do we say, maybe we could do something. So to wake us up in the morning, I have one little exercise for you, okay? You're gonna read a line out loud. It's in English. Are you ready? Yeah, okay. Here we go. I'm gonna start and then you guys continue. Okay, ready? Upper, one more time. Opportunities, yeah. Opportunities are now here. It all depends on the way you view the world. If you read linearly, you see opportunities are nowhere. No, they're now here. Depends on how you view the world. But this is where it becomes more and more important to work together and listen to others. So we started working together with the local fishing community. Four years ago, I knew nothing about this. We started working with this fishing community, trying to understand their challenges and thinking how could we build networks from the Nordics where we have a high degree of technology developing in many different areas and see could we combine our resources and create new solutions? So I'm gonna show you just a very brief little video. So roll the video, please. The Pelodrome Project, part of the Pines Ocean Watch Initiative by Ocean Tech Hub LDA. Fishing has long defined the livelihoods of coastal communities in Portugal, with 90% of the industry made up of small to medium-sized fisheries. Yet these fisheries are at risk. Increased investment in automation by large-scale fisheries is driving down competitiveness. Ocean litter continues to threaten marine ecosystems, reducing fish biomass, and reduced opportunities are pushing younger generations to city-based industries, casting doubt over the future of coastal communities. With this in mind, we developed Pelodrome, an innovation project that combines state-of-the-art digital technologies to streamline the process of locating and catching pelagic fish. Together with our partners, the Pelodrome Project will develop an information service that will equip fishermen with the location and quantities of nearest catches, using patented drone technology specifically adapted to Portuguese maritime conditions provided by our partner BirdView. The Pelodrome service will combine artificial intelligence to search for surface-related indicators and use marine scanning devices to identify the biomass below the surface. By increasing search ranges and identification accuracy, we will reduce fisherman's time at sea, their risk, emissions, and costs, strengthening the competitiveness of their work. The drones will also map coastal waters, providing vital information on extant location and type of subsurface waste, a problem which presently costs the Portuguese fisheries 60 million euros. Through a blue-circular economy model and bilateral relations among Portugal, Norway, and Sweden, the Pelodrome Project seeks to digitally transform coastal communities, bringing in new skills and opportunities that lead to thriving, sustainable futures. As one of the few remaining fishing ports in operation in Portugal, the coastal town of Peniche will be the setting for our first implementation. A fishing community with unique opportunities, fishing has shaped life here for centuries, with some 600 fishermen still active, despite a number of economic and social challenges. With its extensive fishing knowledge and strong entrepreneurial mindset, Peniche presents a solid base for future development and the ideal launching point for the Pelodrome Project, co-funded by EEA and Norway Grants. So this was just a prototype that you saw there in the big ship, no, no, no. We're actually working, we're going to be launching our pilot in about one week, two weeks. The idea isn't that the fishermen will fish more, they have a quota system, but we can actually save their time at sea by 50% because they spend so much time looking for those fish out there, but it's also about creating this ability to understand, is there any by-catch? What is in the nets? So that when they bring up a catch, it actually is a sustainable catch and one that's competitive for them. But the whole idea then is that, can we actually then work with other resources? And one of the hugest issues that we have is ghost nets that continue to fish at the bottom of the ocean. We said, could we then work with the fishermen? What is one of the causes of this? Well, that many fishing nets are like thrown away or burned up, go into landfills, dumped at sea. This is a fantastic resource. Here are all these nets, these are nylon nets. So what we've been doing then is trying to see how can we take this trapped resource of waste and turn it into a valuable new material? Now when we designed this four months, four years ago, we thought, oh, it'd be really easy, just grind up those nets and you turn them into pellets for 3D printing. Yeah, right. It is so difficult because most of the knowledge out there about materials is about virgin materials, virgin plastic. And there's no like standardization yet ready for these recycled materials, a huge challenge. I mean, I would love to have some type of software that would enable us to figure out what should we mix with our fishing nets? To what percentage to enable this type of characteristics that would come out at the other end? So lots and lots of challenges here and this is a tremendous resource that we have. So what are we doing with these pellets? Well, part of our model was saying, hey, could we actually turn them into something new? And so we actually looked and spanned and we started compounding this material first with an organization in Sweden, then with, we found a partner in Portugal, Cabo Pol, creating these pellets with this material, these other material mineral wastes and so on in them. But we couldn't find the actual technology in Portugal. So we had to build a network with Sweden, with research institutes of Sweden and some universities to actually use one of these large industrial robot arms for large-scale additive manufacturing. Please raise your hand if you've seen this before. We usually think of like XYZ, smaller 3D printers. This enables large-scale products to be made because we don't wanna turn this resource into something that will just get thrown away that has a short product life cycle. So we thought, well, maybe we could actually start out by potentially making furniture. Let's see if it goes. No, it didn't. Anyway, I have a little video there which actually shows this machine where it's printing out our fishing nets that have been combined with something else. But this again, this is a huge challenge. I thought, oh, we just do this. We need to understand. I mean, it would be fantastic to have sensors on this robot head, on the extruder, right? To actually in real time adjust the speed, adjust the temperature. I thought this would be an easy thing that there are so many different parameters that come in here that creates the option space is huge. And so this is, we actually just submitted a project. We're trying to develop some software around this. And why are we doing this? Because we think that we can create something potentially now, okay, it's only, say, furniture, but you have to start somewhere to turn these opportunities into, say, a viable business commercial model to actually facilitate, enable money to come in. This is a very labor-intensive process. So well, maybe we can do some larger pieces of furniture. So up there on the right, we actually ended up starting a company in Sweden called Ekbakken Studios to actually try to get these products to market to create awareness around the opportunities. And our real goal is then saying, can we create hubs, a network of local hubs, local small micro factories where we bring in waste, maybe we compound it with some graphene, some of these new nanomaterials, and then print out something new for the local market. We've also been experimenting with blockchain to enable traceability and new circular economy models. This is what I've been working with. I'd like to challenge all of you, gonna give you a few slides left, a short quiz. I work with social networks, fascinated by how knowledge flows through informal networks, and that's what got me into studying open-source software. When you look at A and B, I question, which one of these is more of a solution finder? Can find those pieces out there and put them together as opposed to being a problem solver and doing things themselves. Which one is more successful or that? Which one is better at seeing different scenarios and collecting information around that and about that and having these collective discussions? It's impossible to see, isn't it? You have to go one step out. What does the network look like of those who you network with? Completely different picture. So take that step back. Think about your own networks. Today, go out and meet people who you've never met before and talk about, say, some of these issues. What does the future look like? What does Ireland look like in 10 years? Are your own industry? Because clearly here, those with B, like a B, are those are able to see different signals from the periphery, envision different scenarios, and more innovative and come up with these solutions that we need to take on to solve our challenges. No one knows everything. Everyone knows something. All knowledge resides in humanity. But you all inspired me to say no, all knowledge resides in networks. It is in our networks because we have around six degrees. Well, actually now, 5.7, 5.8 degrees of separation. So from me to Jim, for example, one degree and from Jim on, two degrees. I'm sure you're all familiar with this. But I think it's fascinating to think what might the future look like as internet penetration comes down. We have all the knowledge in our networks to take on our global challenges. It's up to us to do it. So I thank you very much. If you love knowledge, set it free. Thank you.