Let's start from a precise concept: 60% of the world population believes that innovation will be the main factor that will influence economic growth in the next 30 years. Innovation is one of the driving forces of our society and represents the constant engine of new ideas. When CERN researchers started the World Wide Web in the 1990s, nobody ever thought that the "www" would totally revolutionize our existence and our way of communicating.

Internet technology was not considered a true innovation until 5 years after its advent.

We have gone from nearly 2 billion illiterate people in the world to 872 million in the past 10 years while the number of distance learning programs has grown to the point that today the six largest universities for distance learning are located in countries like Turkey, China, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Korea. The speed of Internet diffusion also in emerging countries is unprecedented. According to data reported by the World Bank, in the countries of the "Third World", the use of smartphones has spread to such an extent that today there are more families who own a mobile phone than those who have access to electricity and toilets.

A recent and modern example could be Elon Musk that some years ago launched a car from his Tesla automaker into orbit and publishes the video on his Twitter profile by writing: "Apparently, there is a car in orbit around the earth."

At this precise moment when I try to talk about innovation, there is a technology that more than any other is redesigning the map of mutual influences between nations and continents. This technology is called blockchain. If I had to give my definition, I would say that blockchain is an emerging technology that replaces the need for third-party institutions to provide trust in financial, contractual and voting activities. The blockchain is a ledger, a register. Each unit of the register represents a "block", and the blocks are linked together in the order in which they were created. Blocks are connected using encryption, which binds them in a virtually uneditable way.

For some, the blockchain represents a clear digital conjugation of a reason of Trust that can take on an almost social value, which would allow the development of a new form of democracy, truly decentralized and able to guarantee everyone the opportunity to verify, control and have total transparency in any type of choice or transaction.

I was particularly impressed with the data in the report produced by the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on the Future of Software & Society in 2015, which conducted a survey asking about a thousand executives and experts in the technology sector, what the technological changes were that are changing traditional society. The survey proposed to the interviewees on their impression of when the peak of these technologies would occur in a period of 10/15 years, shows for example the perception that one has on the speed of global change.

(Deep Shift Technology Tipping Points and Societal Impact, World Economy Forum)

As shown by the graph, the speed with which technologies are imposing is impressive but above all this shows how the world will work quite differently in 10 years. In 2027, for example, there will be total awareness and global diffusion of blockchain technology.