Keynote: Indy Johar

Event report

[Read more session reports and live updates from the 2nd Western Balkan Digital Summit]

Mr Indy Johar (Architect; Co-founder of 00 (project00.cc); Senior Innovation Associate with the Young Foundation; Visiting Professor at the University of Sheffield; and Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member, UNDP) opened a discussion on digital skills.

According to Johar, if one looks back through history, it becomes apparent that we are living in a moment of a great transition – the digital transition.

Johar acknowledged that the digital transition will bring massive disruptions on the labour market, but in his opinion, the biggest change will concern administration, and the destruction of bureaucracy. He added that Uber didn’t destroy the taxi driver, it destroyed the administration.

In his opinion, the biggest issue of this great transition will be the destruction of values in the next 15-20 years. The monopolisation of value will leave economies unable to achieve digital transition.

The transition to a digital economy will not be focused on start-ups or corporations, it will include fundamental shifts in all segments of society: nutrition, water, air quality – everything that affects human capacities necessary for our future economy.

In Johar’s opinion, to achieve digital transition in a society, we will need new welfare systems, new institutional infrastructures, and new regulations. He emphasised the importance of an institutional infrastructure that would unlock mental health abilities. Johar stated that the industrial revolution always happens almost simultaneously with institutional reform, and underlined that institutional reform is crucial for a society to be able to achieve digital transition. He also spoke about the continuous simultaneous evolution of regulation and technology, noticing that reimagining standards is simultaneous to technologies being reimagined.

By Andrijana Gavrilović