Future of Business Development in the Age of Blockchain | Shayan Chawla | TEDxCUC Ulster University

Dive into the cutting-edge world of business development with Shayan Chawla in this compelling TEDx talk. Shayan unveils the transformative potential of blockchain technology in shaping the future landscape of business development. Shayan Chawla is an accomplished Business Development Manager with a distinct specialization in the Higher Education Industry. Over the last five years, Shayan has played a pivotal role in steering the strategic growth initiatives of numerous prestigious universities in the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. His unwavering commitment to advancing educational institutions reflects not only in his professional expertise but also in his passion for shaping the future of higher education. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

I want all of you to imagine if trust is not a luxury and transactions are not just transparent but they are temper free nobody can temper with them that is the future of Business Development in the age of blockchain technology today I will be taking you through a journey

Where we will explore what is blockchain what is business development and how does our future look like and why does it impact you because businesses impact economies and economies impact individuals all of us are individuals but what is business development how did we get here so we

All know what sales are sales are transactional they’re short-term they’re quantifiable and they’re primarily focused on attaining short-term goals of businesses so your s and they are quite quantifiable you can quantify them but business development on the other hand is not just about closing a deal it is

Bigger than that it is about building relationships a lot of time in business development you have to go through losses sometime a customer will return you something and you’ll have to give them the whole money back that’s a loss but you do it with a long-term approach

In mind so Business Development can be called relationship based whereas sales is based on transaction so now that we understand what business development is let’s look at where are we now where is business development of 2023 let’s explore a case study this case study is incredibly important because it will

Ultimately tell you where we stand so w Disney acquired 21st Century Fox these two big giants came together in 2017 just within four months wal Disney felt that that was the right decision for them acquiring 21st Century Fox would help them with their business and 21st

Century Fox that they they felt that we were valued fairly and we would sell our company to Disney it just took them four months and the closing of the deal afterward also took them only three months this not considered like a lot of time for an acquisition of this size but

What took the most amount of time was the regulatory approvals and legal documentation 1.6 years and this is not a this not like it’s it’s not is not an exceptional case this happens every day there’s a lot of red taping which acts as a barrier in terms of business growth

And I will come back to business development business development isn’t just sales so it’s all it’s all about developing businesses in in different ways so it can be joint uh mergers acquisition it can be strategic partnership so in this case this became a barrier Disney and 21st Century Fox they

Do have the resources to bear this law loss because time is a loss if you lose time you lose but young startups won’t have this sort of luxury and it was such a major problem for both of these organizations that they had a caveat in the contract Disney and 21st Century Fox

That Disney would pay 2.5 billion reverse termination fee in case regulatory approval doesn’t go through so they both both of these businesses understand uh these regulatory approvals and legal challenges as a tangible threat so it’s not just a logistical nightmare but it is all a tangible

Thread to the growth of a business but this is where blockchain comes in and this is how blockchain is going to solve this problem which will ultimately make it seamless for businesses to grow and which can be incredible for us as individuals what is blockchain so I put

The boring definition up on screen but I’m going to tell you an example which will hopefully make it easy let’s say you go in a contract with a bank that contract is incredibly important you don’t want some tampering you don’t want hacking if you want to

Secure that what do you do let’s say somehow you get get these magical powers and you convert that contract into thousand different original versions of it it’s difficult in this world we only copy things but let’s hypothetically imagine you are able to attain a thousand version of the same contract

The original version and then you go to a bank in koton one of the best banks in koton and you put it in a wall just one of them and the second contract you go to Dubai and the third contract you go to abudhabi uh you go to Saudi you go to

Australia USA you go to you go to a thousand different cities around the world and you identify the best banks and you store it inside a vault now you’re convinced that okay nobody can hack you so somebody wants to hack that that that contract what are the what are

The option option is there’s only one option hack a thousand different banks go to a th different cities and make thousand different amendments because if you only hack One Bank raw one bank and temper the contract 99 999 other contracts are saying something and this one contract is saying something else

That’s blockchain so if you can hack one version of blockchain what about the multiple original digital copies that blockchain is creating for you what about those that is what makes a blockchain so exciting because this has never been done before and this will have a direct impact on businesses how

Let’s talk about supply chain so you know there is a very interesting quote and I’m not claiming credit for it first time entrepreneurs focus on the product and then they fail second time entrepreneurs focus on the supply chain and then they succeed supply chain holds

A lot of power it can either make your business or break your business how do you identify supply chain in this modern day age so you collect sample from them so you’re trusting them that they have given you something that’s the average so it’s not an um excellent uh version

Of one product that they just to average and what are the other options you can read about them on the online uh on the internet you can look at the legal documentation and that’s it you have to trust them but imagine if you if all of

The supply chain around the world if the norm of the market is all of the supply chain has to be tracked digitally using blockchain so if you order something online through an online retailer you see the delivery right it will be delivered to you in 5 days and 3 days

And the driver is 5 minutes away it has happened to me that I haven’t received a package but it says that congratulations you youve received your package these data services how can you trust that because your source of information for that supply chain is the vendor the

Himself so that doesn’t count but if all the supply chain processes are on the digital world using blockchain you’ve got thousand other ways to verify that and if you are able to verify your supply chain effectively you will end up picking the right vendors and this is incredibly important in sensitive industry like

Pharmaceutical how do you track your drug to make sure it is being tested properly it is being ethically sourced and also talk about the porry industry it’s it’s about your health because you will be eating it the track it from the very beginning is it is it free range is

It being sourced ethically because if a business claims that we are free range you trust them because it says on the internet but now you can track it because not one not there’s no individual who owns blockchain so that has a direct impact on the growth of your business development smart

Contracts so smart contracts will help you if I want to go in anou with one of the bigger Ministries here and Doha for example we will have to go through a lot of legal framework it will take us around 3 month and there will be a legal

Team involved but if you have got smart contracts available everything is verifiable online using blockchain then that transaction is going to go a lot smoother and quicker and time is money efficient auditing so the big four posted the statistic that on average it takes them around 12 to 16 weeks to

Conduct an audit of a big company experts are predicting once blockchain becomes the norm it will come down to two to three weeks and ultimately a few days and eventually we will be able to conduct an audit of a company with 5,000 employees within minutes it sounds out

Linish right now but internet didn’t sound real 20 years ago as well if you were able to conduct an audit of a company with 5,000 employees within a few minutes imagine the barriers you’re removing from trade and how much more trade will happen that will ultimately help us with the economy tokenization of

Assets so once you’ve identified the people you want to do business with how do you Trav transfer the ownership to your name so if you have got identify a supplier from from one corner of the world it’s going to take you a few seconds to transfer the ownership from

Their name to your name and now you want to pay them back you use blockchain again you pay them via crypto less taxes no uh no no challenges legal challenges and you are able to globalize your trade data and privacy data is privacy data and privacy is important for anyone but

In particular for Industries like Health Finance these are sensitive things and you’re able to make sure that your data is secure because of blockchain and cl so this is my favorite part crossborder is it’s really important for me to because I come from Pakistan when I graduated from Australia I moved back to

Pakistan I didn’t find any job and most of my friends who were of my age they couldn’t find jobs as well but here comes the internet we found jobs of a few of my friends found jobs with companies in Canada I found a job with the University of the US and we were

Based in Pakistan and we were able to work for those companies and earn decent salary and we were able to start a career That’s The Power of internet now imagine if everything is done on blockchain you remove further barriers and you amplify what is what internet is

Already doing you can globalize it and you all know the benefit of globalization one might question that if internet is already globalizing things what is blockchain going to do but you need to understand internet was there in the 19 ’90s as well but you couldn’t watch YouTube because you weren’t fully

Tapping into the potential of internet and now we think we have tapped into the potential of internet but we haven’t that’s just phase two and they will be phase three and no one knows when the when is the last phase because in the ’90s we thought that was the future now

90 is a his is a history so blockchain will enable globalization and trade that will change thing so where does this leave us does this mean if you have less barriers there will be more monopolies because you’ve got big companies now they have less barriers to eat up small

Startups and buy them that’s one that’s one possibility but I beg to differ I think this is a great equalizer just three months ago a young YouTuber who started selling chocolates three three years ago was able to capture a significant chunk of the market share of the chocolate Distributors around the

World against a chocolate producing giant who has been producing chocolates for the past 100 years how does a young kid in the USA was able to sell a big put a big dent into the market share of a legacy manufacturer who’s been doing it for 100 years because of power of

Equalization now everyone’s equal you provide value and you will get the market share it doesn’t depend it doesn’t matter how strong of a brand you have so I will conclude this in three parts step one blockchain is going to make it easier for people to do businesses it’s going to be accessible

You will be able to do quality control now people let’s go back to the example of suppliers people who are actually adding value who providing you with the best suppliers will earn contracts naturally other businesses who are not at the optimum level will have to step up the game because competition so now

There’s more competition everyone is be every business will slowly become ethical there are a lot of business around the world who is not environmentally friendly but they have to be now because consumers are demanding it too so slowly surely they will all the business will have to step

Up the game because because blockchain is creating transparency and everybody wants Market and last thing is once you’ve got a lot of competition in the market who gets empowered you get empowered consumers will get empowered and whenever have whenever consumers became empowered you’ve seen the benefit of blockchain trickle down to individual

Level thank [Applause] You