The Exponential Mindset

Using Blockchain to Achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

The ixo Foundation recently announced a monumental partnership with Singularity University Ventures. Based out of NASA’s Moffett Field campus, Singularity University aims to tackle the world’s greatest global challenges with an approach seldom seen in the development sector.

Their strategy leverages exponential technology — the latest innovations that follow an exponential curve of growth. The original exponential curve was described by Moore’s Law, that depicted the accelerating growth of computing power, which predictably doubled every 18 months. As a result, it was easy to predict the computing power that would be available in the future and plan applications around the technology that would be available in the future. With exponentials, the advances start slowly — almost negligibly slow — the true impact is realized in the later stages of the curve when the doubling benefits gather momentum.

“Exponential advances happen slowly at first, and then dramatic; disappointment to amazement; denial to awe” ~ Vivek Wadwa, Singularity University Faculty

In today’s world, most organizations — and people — think linearly, adding marginal gains to their progress every year. The sustainable development sector has consistently suffered from the same linear patterns. Scores of global NGOs save lives with persistence and passion, but still maintain the short term goal of next time simply saving more. These gains still are commendable. Every additional life saved is important. It’s the life of a person who can raise their children, support the economy, and contribute to the community. But this strategy is only going to treat the symptoms. Society’s problems will never be solved with a linear approach.

Exponential thinkers often come from the fringes of industry and are able to imagine whole sectors in a new light, unencumbered by the structures built over decades of marginal improvement. While their ideas are often seen as trying to ‘boil the ocean’, the true vision is in the exponential mindset as much as the idea itself. Successful exponential entrepreneurs are able to take their moonshot goal and create a company that incentivizes users today while building out their vision for the future.

At ixo, our exponential mindset led us to develop our massive transformative purpose — to optimize impact. But it also guides us as we leverage exponential technologies like blockchain to tackle the root of what’s preventing the myriad of global aid organizations from achieving the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals — data.

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goalsun

Despite the more than $1 trillion that goes into solving the SDGs every year, trusted data around how the money was spent and what was achieved is scarce. Without this data, organizations, funders, and governments have little to go on to make informed decisions about the work they are undertaking. ixo is solving this problem with a vision that has never been seen in this industry before.

The ixo protocol enables users to create an impact claim about the work they have completed. This could be a claim an organization vaccinated all 5 year olds in a particular geographic zone in Kenya. It could also be a claim around cleaning a certain number of pounds of garbage out of the Pacific ocean. When the claim is verified, ‘proof of impact’ is created, enabling both the funder and the organization to know the work has happened and track the impact they’ve achieved. The key to the exponential benefits of the protocol is in the data collected as a part of the claim. This data is stored in a Global Impact Ledger, an open data commons that can be accessed by governments, researchers, and other organizations and funders. This data can then be used to optimize the work undertaken across the industry, meaning a more cohesive and effective development response across a variety of disparate and disconnected parties.

In the shorter term, funders are incentivized to use the protocol to ensure their investments are spent wisely and to drive evaluation costs down. Organizations are incentivized as they will benefit from the increased funding that comes with these assurances. Over time, a mass of data will accumulate, creating a feedback loop that creates better evaluation sources, more data to use in project development, and most importantly, the opportunity for organizations to achieve more with less. The information gleaned can help users to identify gaps, cross-leverage effective programming, and achieve more with the resources available.

ixo Foundation Founding Partners, Unicef and Innovation Edge

For example, ixo has been working with Unicef and Innovation Edge on a project called Amply that is built on the ixo protocol. The Amply application is a basic mobile interface that allows teachers to take attendance digitally instead of using a paper based system. For every positive attendance record, an impact claim is created and these claims can be used as proof of impact to access subsidies. Most importantly, the data collected through the claims is accessible to other organizations, governments, and researchers who can use it to improve their work. They might use it to see which schools have high attendance rates and apply learnings from those schools to schools with low attendance rates. They could also use it to compare with demographic data for the region to see what proportion of children in a region are attending pre-school at all. The possibilities are extensive, and the potential increase in impact as a result of a single piece of data is exponential.

Amply is being used in 72 schools across South Africa and has recorded more than 45,000 attendance records.

The benefits of a decentralized global ledger of impact data is clear — the UN itself has called for a data revolution for sustainable development. With exponential technology and an exponential mindset, ixo is transforming the sustainable development sector and enabling organizations around the world to optimize their impact.