#Ep. 28: Behavioural Science, Transparency, and the role of Governments: A conversation with Maja Vujinovic, the Former CIO of Emerging Tech at GE

About this Episode

In our next instalment of Encrypted, episode 28 brings you an inspiring discussion with Maja Vujinovic, the CEO of OGroup and the former CIO of Emerging Technology at GE.

Maja first talks about the spark that caused her to go full time in blockchain after GE. The topics around deciphering data, what incentivizes behaviours, token economies, to name a few, were the topics that stimulated her interest and has ultimately led her to speak to global corporates about different ways you can incentivize behaviour for better business models.

Data, behavioural science and hype

Ahmed and Faisal start off the discussion with Maja about data to see what role it plays with blockchain networks and how that interacts with behavioural economics and science that is typically embedded in these networks.

Maja explains her story at GE in how she managed to convince upper management about the opportunities that well-built incentive models backed by the right data will help drive business growth and newer business models for the firm.

Transparency in large organisations – Yay or nay?

As Maja explains her experiences, this leads Ahmed to ask why do large corporates not like transparency? Maja spills the beans on what are in the minds of corporates and argues that in the real-world open source, for all its transparency, may actually not work.
Rather, it’s the rise of technology and rising customer expectations, transparency is being forced on the face of corporates and governments. This develops into a very interesting discussion about the philosophy behind transparency.

What is the most important function of the government?

Maja proposes this above question stimulating a discussion on the responsibility that governments have with regards to their functions. There are clear use cases for the government to use blockchain to make their processes more efficient. Great! But now they have more coordinated data – uh oh, can we trust the governments to not abuse this data? Has blockchain brought power to those that it seeks to destroy? Tune in to this episode to hear what is being discussed!

Maja also touches on the topic of surveillance capitalism and explains that we have to think twice before building these tools otherwise we may see the wrong side of technology impacting humanity for the worse.

Touching upon centralisation, Ahmed talks about how decentralisation can only be realised in a slow fashion as we cannot have a full shift from centralisation to decentralisation overnight. Maja did not only agree but also explained her experiences at GE attested to this, explaining how their customers reacted to initial pilot projects that were launched.
Make sure to catch Maja talk about the other pilot projects and use cases she’s been involved with in the past!

Oh – and are the institutions really coming?

The trio deep dive into the aspect of what institutional money coming into crypto really means. Many people talk about it, but it’s never really explained properly. Is it heaps of money buying up bitcoin? Or is money going into specific blockchain funds? Or is it something else?

After Maja gives her thoughts on this, Faisal goes back to ask the question of whether or not we actually need humans to be their own banks, have specific applications, or have multi sig wallets because they are complicated, and humans are not used to it. Make sure to tune in this episode to hear Maja’s thoughts on this!

There is no killer app?!

As Maja toys with the idea that the killer app would be in gaming, she backtracks and says there is no killer app in the market. Faisal then poses the question of what do we need to see before a killer app comes along? Maja argues that Volume, true utility, deep purpose and underlying value are the 4 main traits before we see a real killer app.

Well what an episode that was, do make sure to tune in as we talked about the above and much more!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Episode Comments