On the Quest for a Digital Renaissance

Stephan Jürgensen Engberg

I started out specializing in Digital Business Architect & Strategy to build Customer Loyalty and sustainable competitive advantage in both a specific corporate and national cluster dimension. Never before was the from increasing competition bigger and opportunities from new technological means and business models as available. I worked more than 10 years with this focus both theoretical and practical in both large organizations and as an entrepreneur getting to the point where I was teaching and doing executive consulting on Strategy and solutions.

However in this process, I realized a fundamental problem. That markets have come unstable as consumers are made into assets of the few super-large winner-takes-it-all entities. This means that EVERYBODY loose - consumers, society and companies - as all are reduced to providers to highly centralized power structures that do not provide value, but feed from everybody else at their expense. As such I in late 1990s expanded my focus to the often overlooked security design aspects on how to redesign power structures to empower citizens and protect companies from these power structures. I rapidly become part of a small global group of privacy/security by design specialists aiming at restructuring identity to actually secure processes. In this process, I quickly become member of a small group specialists advising and participating in EU research or pre-policy processes.

During the years I have analyzed almost all aspects of security and digital infrastructure and - standing on the shoulders of giants - created numerous inventions to solve fundamental problems- some of which have been transformed into business models and solutions in production (e.g. RFID), but most still on the drawing board suffering from market imperfections such as bad regulation or technical standards that prevent security - whatever the reason.

Having a Innovation Strategy perspective to security bring a disruption to the thinking as almost everybody else are technicians (focusing on either anonymity or simple access control/surveillance), soft activists focusing on abstract human rights or merely entities seeing security as a barrier to their interest. Understanding the WHY to drive understanding of requirements and the impetus to go beyond easy assumptions a very powerful driver to new understanding and solutions.

It does, however, also put you in opposition to the purists - legal or technical - balancing multi-stakeholder issues is not for amateurs as you have to address the really tough questions without resorting to primitive and naive assumptions. Anonymity of a stakeholder rarely can provide the basis of healthy society processes, but identification and dis-empowering citizens is even worse as it represents the biggest source of failures.

Highlights:

1. Innovation strategist focusing on value creation and Customer loyalty
2. Specialist on Identity, Trust Socio-Economics and Security/Privacy by Design
3. Independent Consultant
4. Serial Entrepreneur
5. Often speaker on research, pre-policy or technology assessment conferences & workshops

Theoretical

• Computer Scientist and Economist from Copenhagen Business School (M.Sc.)
  • Specializing In innovation strategy and competitiveness
• London Business School.
  • International strategy and entrepreneurship

Work Experience

• Unibank/Privatbanken (Nordea), 1986-1995
• IBSEN Micro Structures, 1995-1998
• TietoEnator, 1998-1999
• Open Business Innovation, 1999- (founder)
  • Priway, 2004-2012
  • RFIDsec, 2004-2010
  • Numerous projects for government, digital infrastructure, companies

Lecturing/teaching

• Privacy / Direct Marketing Copenhagen Business School, 2002-
• Security in mobile environments, Danish Technical University
• eBusiness Strategy & Security, Copenhagen It University

Research / Academic

• HYDRA - Trustworthy Interoperability Middle-ware for Ambient Computing
  • Security, IT & Business Architect
• Strategic Advisory Board of EU ICT Security & Dependability Task force
• Eu Pre-FP6 Roadmapping on Privacy & Identity
• EU IST Research Proposal & Project Evaluator
  • Security, Policy Forecasting & Evaluation, Internet of things, Ethics

Selected Keynotes / speeches at Scientific conferences / Program Committees

• IFIPTM Trust Confererence, Keynote
• RFID Security Program Commite
• Final Roundtable OECD Conference on Network Security
• EU DG Justice Workshop on Security and Privacy Economics
• NATO Advanced Research Conference on Identity, Security & Democracy
• EU-US Summit on Cybertrust, security and Dependability
• EU IST Conference Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence (SWAMI)
• ESOF Conference on Critical Technology Trends
• EU Horizon 2020/Digital Agenda 2012
• Transatlantic Consumer Dialog - Workshop on RFID
• Danish Technology Council on e-Election and Internet of Things

Publications / papers

• Towards Semantic Resolution of Security in Ambient Environments PDF
• RFID paper (2004) PDF
• Privacy Authentication - persistent non-identification in Ubiquitous Env
• De overvågede
• Applied patents US20030158960, PCT/DK01/00352 and US 20070106892

Other

• DK Government Report on New Security Models
• Selected as Moral Exemplar in the Computing Profession to Follow - Transatlantic Ethical Reseaerch Project Good Computing