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Editor’s update:
As you read this, E-Health’s bet, “Riva Digital,” is exhibiting in Barcelona at Mobile World Congress; where it will unveil its new life-changing app – and very likely disrupt the global medical device industry. Check back soon for Part 2 of this challenge story and the bet’s impact for Switzerland’s health and future prosperity.
Riva Digital’s challenge bet is playing for the highest stakes of any roundtable wager I’ve encountered since starting this storytelling assignment. Unlike other bets competing in the challenge, Riva Digital’s bet is personal. The stakes it’s playing for are your life.
Stop a moment. Think of four people. They can be anyone, a family member, neighbour, a friend or stranger who caught your eye this morning and flashed back a smile. Picture their faces as you remember them. Slowly count each: 1-2-3-4, on one hand.
Now, open your thumb and add yourself making five: one person for each finger. Looking at your open hand, close one finger. Four remain. One is gone. That missing digit represents what’s at stake in Riva’s bet. Which finger did you close? Was it your friend? Was it you?
Here’s where Riva Digital’s bet gets personal. One of the five individuals you just counted will die because they suffer from hypertension. Also known as high blood pressure (HBP), hypertension is a silent killer. As Dr. Thomas Guggi, orthopaedic consultant with Schulthess Clinic points out, “The main problem with HBP is that it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t painful, you don’t realize it until in many cases, it’s too late.”
And then it kills with statistical precision. The shocking facts are 20% of the entire population of Switzerland experiences high blood pressure. The consequences make HBP the #1 cause of death in Switzerland.
Health experts agree, the best ways to protect yourself are being aware of HBP’s risks and making life-style changes that matter. These facts have been known for decades, but have proven ineffective moving people to change their behaviour, as HBP’s deadly #1 status attests.
The roundtable E-Health bets that by September 2017, it can create a digital ecosystem that enables people to increase their health competency through participation. Furthermore, the Roundtable bets that by April 2018, more than 100,000 people will be involved in the digital ecosystem and one year later these people will have demonstrably lowered their blood pressure.
The alchemy of Riva’s bet suggests a formula for roundtables and enterprises struggling with too little time and too many ideas to come up with innovative digital solutions for massive impact.
Like all challenge roundtables, E-Health had only 12 months to originate a bet and deliver it. Unlike other roundtables, it attracted 20+ willing partners with commercial and private health interests. Too many cooks in the kitchen is a recipe for mediocrity at best, and dogfood at worst. Were it not for an early decision by Table Captain, Claudia Pletscher, Head Development & Innovation at Swiss Post, Riva Digital might have undergone a similar fate.
To discover how an over-subscribed roundtable devised this amazing bet, I spoke with Tobias Pforr, founder and managing partner of RedRock. Tobias sits on the challenge steering committee and has been deeply involved since the bet originated.
Tobias remembered his invitation, “Claudia reached out to me and said, ‘Hey look, we have this E-Health roundtable. We have five different pitches on the table. We’re not really sure how to narrow it down. Could you coach us?”
He explained, “My strategy was to make it personal – because there were so many different organizations in the room, to leave out the organizations, the corporates, and focus on people – make it clear health is about each individual … in the end, innovation in the realm of health should also lead to more prosperity, meaning healthier people and less effort to stay healthy.”
The human-centric approach payed off as he guided them to focus attention around a symbolic hero. A hero the partners already knew: their company’s customers, employees and patients, i.e. Riva’s hero could be you or me!
However, unless the group could identify one health problem their respective heroes had in common, an issue with enough magnitude to make major impact, all the resources these health industry leaders brought to the table were moot.
To find that holy grail among a universe of health topics, Tobias prompted partners to describe their hero’s pain points and see where one hero’s pain overlapped another’s. They cited pains like cumbersome file sharing, difficulties obtaining second opinions and specific diseases like diabetes. Then a doctor raised the topic of hypertension.
He and others in the room pointed out, “diabetes is actually quite well understood and controlled, but hypertension is a big problem, because nearly every fifth person has high blood pressure and about CHF 600 million are spent annually just on blood pressure-lowering medication.” Tobias reflected, “the topic of HBP was not completely new, but it was a big enough challenge that people agreed, ‘Yeah, if we do something and if we can provide a solution, we would have an impact!”
That depends. Until now, providence, persistence and luck have distinguished this “poster child of challenge bets.” Riva’s track record of recent wins however make it an odds-on favourite.
Since the summer of 2017, E-Health has:
Last week, I asked Dr. Guggi about Riva’s chances of winning? His answer invited no 2nd opinion, “The next target is 100’000 by April 1st. I am 100% percent convinced we’ll achieve that goal.”
Be the first to get inside news how Riva Digital’s new blood pressure app functions and moves us to change our behaviour for longer, healthier and happier lives.
The following challenge post was filed in December 2017, but due to a management change with one of the bet’s partners, could not be posted until now. New insights to follow soon. Despite the likelihood (official announcement expected in Q1 2018) that Blockchain has found their white knight, the difficulties this roundtable faces provide useful lessons predicting success or failure for future Swiss public-private innovation collaborations. Reader comments welcome.
Every horse race has its favorites to win. You can tell which ones by checking the odds set by bookmakers in the racing form or live tote-board where information such as track condition, pools (total amount of money wagered), odds, and payouts are posted.
As I noted in, Who will finish in the money? some digitalswitzerland challenge bets have been off the pace and are only now finding their stride. Case in point, Digital Real Estate roundtable, betting on Digitalizing Swiss Building Standards, has started writing specs in earnest for their digital modelling scheme.
Other bets, like Blockchain’s, bolted out to early leads and as recently as September, appeared to be the odds-on favorite to win, reported Naila Malemusa. But like Royal Ascot or the Kentucky Derby, no bet is a sure winner until they cross the finish line.
For this story, we’re going inside the war room of Blockchain, one of ten roundtables still in the running as teams enter the back stretch of the challenge. Because with only five months left to reach the finish line, Blockchain’s bet has hit a hurdle, underscoring the difficulty of fostering innovation across public and private sectors – even when the prize is helping move Switzerland into pole position for global digitalization leadership.
Things began well for Blockchain roundtable and its high-powered collaborators: IBM, Ernst & Young and Swisscom. In April 2017, their bet won a straw poll for “Most Lucrative Bet,” among its peers when digitalswitzerland sounded the bugle call to begin the challenge race.
I wasn’t personally at the event, but since meeting some of the Blockchain players and envisioning the impact their bet will have for entrepreneurs and SMEs (small & medium enterprises) in Switzerland and around the world, I get why their wager was honored with the award.
Blockchain’s bet aims to wipe out Switzerland’s embarrassing rank of 54th and 56th (among 138 countries), respectively for the number of procedures and days it takes to found a Swiss domiciled business. Daniel Haudenschild, one of the Blockchain Table Captains, cited this disturbing statistic as a prime motive behind their bet. A former partner with Ernst & Young, in early 2017, he took the reigns as CEO of a new Swisscom enterprise, Swisscom Blockchain AG, to focus exclusively on applying blockchain technology.
During a recent conversation at Swisscom’s four-storied labyrinth of open-space offices, clearly designed with a millennium workforce in mind, Daniel recalled a discussion among his roundtable collaborators. “They (World Economic Forum) said we were somewhere behind the Republic of Congo and a few others … and we said, that’s probably not good enough for Switzerland. We need to change that.”
At face value, “We need to change that,” sounds like a standard reply by a CEO confronted with an commonplace corporate problem. Yet the change he is referring to is the bet named “most lucrative,” among all challenge bets – no small feat in a contest that boasts many other bets which have tremendous commercial potential.
True to the spirit of the challenge, Blockchain’s bet grew out of digitalswitzerland members’ certainty many important innovations will never be attempted. Daniel put it into context like this, “If companies find a good business case for blockchain, then they go and create a blockchain in their private environments, which works for them very well; they’re the main beneficiaries of it and therefore have no issues sponsoring it.”
Daniel explained why something as game-changing for Switzerland as a digitalized Commercial Registry would never be attempted by a Swisscom, an IBM or any other private enterprise. “When the blockchain turns out to be a larger infrastructure question, it gets put to a (challenge) roundtable because no one (private) entity has enough, has one solid benefit from it.”
In Blockchain’s example, roundtable collaborators are betting on delivering a crucial innovation for the good of Switzerland, that offers no short-term business case for participating companies, or ROI (return on investment) in the foreseeable future. Such innovation is not for the timid or financially insecure.
“The Handelsregister (Commercial Registry) blockchain is a very similar thing,” Daniel continued. “It would be great if we had one, but the people sponsoring it would be 26 different cantons.” The note of sarcasm in his voice hints how unlikely Swiss cantons will soon build and finance a digitalized Commercial Registry.
Minutes are expensive and time a scarce commodity for a pure-play blockchain CEO. Sitting in on our conversation, Michael Lewrick, Swisscom Blockchain COO, politely reminds his chief of an approaching conference call. Daniel took the cue and cut to the chase: “If we were successful, we would have a digital Handelsregister. At the moment, we don’t. We’re at the MVP stage. There is a long and yet unclear road as how we can get this (MVP) into a production environment where we actually have one.”
Nearing the end of my time allowance, I asked him what insiders and observers consider a key question for all challenge bets currently running, “What’s at stake if this bet wins or falls short for the average Swiss citizen?”
Daniel must have liked my last question, because his presence noticeably grew larger. “I think that if it’s easy for companies to be founded here from abroad, then IP (intellectual property) and entrepreneurs and the business they bring with them, will come. And they will find Switzerland to be a very attractive place to do business. If you combine that with so much ICO (initial coin offering) capital that’s been coming in as a vehicle to fund new enterprises, then you realize that we provide potentially some of the most stable, some of the most lucrative, some of the most interesting places to do business at the heart of Europe.”
He continued, “So what’s at stake for the guy walking the street? More jobs, more job security, keeping Switzerland at the forefront of innovation and thought leadership in the digital revolution worldwide. If it doesn’t come to pass, we will continue to be number 56th on the list of countries in the world as far as the ease of which to open a business, and then several countries …”
Daniel’s voice trails off thinking of the consequences for Switzerland if Blockchain can’t connect all its links, “… Lichtenstein’s easier, Estonia’s easier, Latvia’s easier, Belgium’s easier, Amsterdam’s easier; there’s many different places to do business.” Raising a red warning sign of what’s at stake for our future prosperity, he closed our interview with a rhetorical question, “why should they come to Switzerland?”
Already back in September, when Blockchain unveiled its digital Commercial Registry MVP, two obstacles were cause for concern – and continue to bedevil its Captains and collaborators.
One is finding the money to pay for the “last mile” – the final development costs of implementing their bet’s MVP. (FYI: all challenge bets must be self-financed as defined under the contest rules. But I sensed from Daniel, and his roundtable co-captain, Johannes Höhener, Head of Fintech Swisscom, they perceived the financing problem more of an annoying to-do in the life of a busy tech executive – than an insurmountable obstacle to their bet’s success.
The second – and graver obstacle is filling a missing link in the chain of procedures to found a Swiss-domiciled company. It’s worth remembering, Blockchain is not proposing a new system – but digitalizing the existing system using blockchain technology, thereby shortening the process from its current lethargic 4-6 weeks to 48 hours.
Below are the legal steps a business must follow to found a Swiss-domiciled company. Without reading ahead, guess which partner (shown in bold) do you think Blockchain’s bet is missing?
You’d be wrong if you guessed cantonal bureaucrats at Commercial Registers were the missing partner in this new digital eco-system. Perhaps not surprising, given the avalanche of recent ICOs and the rise of what has become known as “Crypto Valley,” canton Zug authorities were enthusiastic supporters of this bet from the start of the challenge. The same is true for an engaged cadre of lawyers and notaries also based in Zug.
No, it’s not a public partner Blockchain’s digital eco-system needs. They need an enterprise with a Swiss banking license who can provide a blocked account (in German: Kapitaleinzahlungskonto or Sprerrkonto) service to company founders. Which was surprising to me. Have not Swiss banks been in the forefront of launching innovative digital banking services?
A quick search confirms Swiss banks like UBS, Raiffeisen Schweiz, PostFinance and many others offer the requisite blocked account service. On their “business-easy” website, Credit Suisse advertises how happy they would be to open a blocked account (a.k.a. Capital payment account) for you.
The headline reads, “We would be happy to open a Capital payment account for you.” Which is immediately followed by the text copy “… in just a few steps and entirely paper free. All you have to do is enter the data, verify your identity via a video call*, and sign online. You will receive your account details in just a few minutes ***.”
Did you notice the triple asterisk (***) at the end of that text? I would have skipped it too if I wasn’t looking for clues to the problem of finding Blockchain’s missing Swiss banking partner. The footnote states, “ *** Subject to the bank’s review and acceptance of the application.” Innocent disclaimer? Something we’d expect a bank to insert into all their marketing collaterals.
Call me curious, but I wondered if that triple asterisk might have something to do with Blockchain’s missing link. Might this KYC (know your customer) axiom be the true obstacle to a digitalized Commercial Register? To investigate my hunch, I arranged to speak with the other half of Blockchain’s primary sponsor, IBM Switzerland.
With the start of the new year, all but a handful of challenge contenders are racing down the home stretch with hopes to be crowned winners by crossing the April 2018 finish line. Bets I’ve covered recently like E-Democracy’s Crowdsourced Think Tank and Education Digital’s ICT-Workshops in Schools – are running neck and neck after breaking through the self-financing hurdle.
Which makes it ironic that while Mobility Smart Station is currently running as strong as any challenge round table bet, its jockey and owner are relatively indifferent about racing to the approaching finish line. The reason? At the start of the challenge nine months ago, Smart Station, championed by Swiss Railways SBB, hedged its bet, declaring a 2-year time frame rather than 12 months to make good their bet’s claim:
“The participants of the Smart Station project bet that by April 2019, they will have established Zurich Main Station as the world’s most digital, personal traffic hub for customers, tenants, suppliers and other innovative partners.”
Given their hedge, and compared to other exciting innovation-inciting bets I’ve been reporting, I questioned if this particular Mobility roundtable was merely repurposing a corporate mission statement as challenge bet. SBB’s 2020 Strategy statement fueled my doubts: “…We want to ensure growth is both smart and broad-based, by drawing on digitalization and new technologies and reflecting the various strengths of rail travel. We aim to be digital and personal at the same time…” The 2020 strategy declaration is signed by Monika Ribar, Chairwoman of the BoD, SBB AG and Andreas Meyer, Smart Station Table Captain and CEO of SBB AG.
Waiting under Niki de St. Phalle’s Guardian Angel in Zurich’s main station to meetup with the Smart Station project leader, I recalled my first conversation with Stefan Schöbi, Chairman of the challenge Steering Committee, when he said, “We all know that this (challenge) can stay as a marketing slogan or it can be turned into action …”
With Stefan’s warning top of mind, my mission today was clear: find evidence of what action(s) the Smart Station round table is taking right now to further digital innovation. After all, as a frequent customer of Zurich’s main station, I and 1.25 million daily Swiss travelers who use Swiss Railways’ system, will all be direct beneficiaries if their bet pays off. But I also have an obligation to digitalswitzerland readers and challenge participants not to pull any punches and tell this story like it really is.
The Smart Station bet is led by Bruno Lochbrunner, Head of Conceptual Station Management (which has to be one of the coolest job titles HR ever invented). Bruno shares desk space amongst the warren of walled offices above the Zurich main station. I suspected the building’s architect was a frequent player of the 1980 mega hit video game, Packman, as I followed Bruno down seemingly endless passageways intersecting at random right angles differentiated only by pastel wall colors.
Most of us who live and work in or near Zurich, know the main station as a convenient meeting point or conduit between arriving and departing. For Bruno, it’s his daily living environment. I asked how many hours per week he worked and if spending so much time in the main station wore down his excitement for implementing new innovation?
Instead of suggesting a number of working hours, he said, “To be honest I’m thinking about this all the time, even when I go on holidays. When I’m at airports and shopping centers and I see things, I take pictures. I have a thousand pictures from those malls and airports which give me input so I can learn from them and work here to make this (main station) a better place.”
Once upon a time, I was the Marketing Director for a luxury property developer. A key insight to successfully marketing the company meant understanding what investors and buyers perceived of as “luxury.” In the same line of thought, I pressed Bruno to tell me what it meant to “make this (main station) a better place,” especially given an almost unlimited number of possibilities and equal number of people’s ideas of what “make better” means to them.
Bruno worried me by affirming their bet is part and parcel of SBB’s corporate vision saying, “to put mobility first and all that stuff. This (challenge bet) is one part, to make Zurich main station more digitized and more personal, a more customized train station…” Then he dropped his official SBB persona for a few seconds and confided, “I like to create and work with this big vision – but somebody has to execute. You cannot only write papers and talk visions and all that stuff. Somebody has to execute it. I’m happy that I’m that person, with my team, working hands-on doing things, doing the little things that bring SBB’s vision to life.”
Sensing my ulterior motive to discover if SBB’s bet was more than marketing, Bruno elaborated, “We started this challenge and we want to show people that we are taking it seriously. The first priority was speed. To make something visible for people this year.”
He continued, “Not like we make the station smart and big and then in two years you see something. We are serious about this challenge and we are going to make small improvements – they’re coming right now! And also show that it is not just a saying, ‛Smart Station.’ That was the first thing in 2017. In 2018 and 2019, we have to decide about speed.”
I asked Bruno to walk me through an example of how he’s implementing innovation in Zurich main station as we speak. Sounding like the proud father of a young child, Bruno began telling me about an autonomous robot he first saw attending a startup event in Germany. The robot was developed by the British/Lithuanian startup, Mio Technologies Ltd, and as Bruno recalls the moment, it was love at first sight.
A few weeks earlier, I’d encountered “Mario” (as christened by SBB), on the new lower level of Zurich’s main station. The day I met the Plexiglas bubble-topped Mario, he was surrounded by a pack of teenagers poking at his display screen and making selfies with him. Judging by how the teens were interacting with Mario, it was clear a mobile robot dispensing snacks and drinks had passed the all-important cool test. But beyond cool, Mario represents a viable alternative how a mega-sized enterprise like SBB, with 33’000 full time employees, can pragmatically implement break-thru digital innovation where collaboration and speed are crucial to success.
In KPMG’s annual cross-sector survey of around 1,300 CEOs, the top three strategic priorities of global businesses are boosting speed to market, fostering innovation and implementing disruptive technologies. Bruno explained how Mario exemplifies all three of those priorities. “We saw there’s a possibility to work with a robot startup and Selecta Group (one of our vending machine partners). We put them together and said ‛Okay, let’s make a showcase of Mario the vending machine robot. Let’s see how people react in the train station with this robot.’ We didn’t discuss it very long, we just made it happen. It was done I think in one week.”
Since not seeing the robot since my first encounter, I asked about customers’ feedback to the roaming robot kiosk. His face immediately lost its previous enthusiasm, telegraphing his answer. According to Bruno, 90% of the people who encountered Mario in person really liked it. But the media was not charmed or amused.
The Smart Station project leader’s frustration spilled out, “it’s always this thing, robots taking away our jobs. It’s always this thing. No matter if it’s a vending machine who doesn’t take away any job ’cause we already have vending machines. I mean, Mario would take away vending machines, but that’s not a person …”
Not wishing to rub salt in Bruno’s wounded pride over the Swiss media’s shabby treatment of his brainchild, I changed course and asked if voice recognition was in Mario’s future,
particularly since the SBB Mobile App Timetable recognizes spoken Swiss German dialects thanks to collaboration with Swiss startup, Spitch AG. Bruno redirected my question by revealing they had another robot, “Alfred” (as in Alfred Escher), who is already equipped with voice recognition. Now if Mario is likened to the Star War’s droid R2-D2 – then Alfred would be C-3PO.
Given the media’s negative response to UFO shaped Mario, it wasn’t too surprising where Bruno told me Alfred could be found. “He’s here (in the main station), but right now, I think it’s packed in a box. This is a human (looking) robot, and it interacts more with people than Mario does. Because there are different companies behind Alfred, different startups, different combination of partners. We are not only working with Mario’s developers, but with different companies trying out these robot things; what they’re able and not able to do. To be honest, these robots have quite a lot to learn.”
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