Detailed Plan

The Cardano community is pioneering a new collaborative mindset. A new way of working together. A new way of solving vexing problems. The future has arrived, the challenge is to evenly distribute it; To paraphrase William Gibson[13].

To see opportunity and act upon it requires an entrepreneurial mindset. Entrepreneurs are everywhere. Tech Entrepreneurs, Impact Entrepreneurs, Interpenuers. They are driven by their beliefs, principles and values. They see the world from a local perspective, as it could be.

To develop the entrepreneurial mindset and turn ideas into sustainable projects and ventures, community-led hubs become places entrepreneurs can build knowledge, share information, connect, learn about and support each other. They can evenly distribute the Cardano future.

Current problems and limitations

To stay relevant and sustain their operations Local Hubs need to develop engaging programmes of events, workshops, and networking opportunities. However, as a newly emerging field that blends entrepreneurship, blockchains, token engineering, culture, governance and Cardano it is hard to find expertise to instigate, shape, host and run these events. When language and cultural barriers are factored in, reaching entrepreneurs becomes even more difficult.

Few entrepreneurs are aware of the opportunities, the technical and economic benefits or the Project Catalyst community governance of Cardano; Nor is there a full understanding of how to apply Cardano technology to micro, small and medium businesses, or startups who have the vision to scale. We need local hubs to distribute that knowledge, to make Cardano a viable option for solving market needs. The lack of available expertise restricts a hub's ability to broadcast the potential uses of Cardano's technology to the fullest. We want to change that.

The Team

The team has been responsible for entrepreneurial programme development across New Zealand. A richly diverse multicultural society of the pacific.

Jo Allum (@yojo): Entrepreneur, Communication Designer and Creative Director. Co-Founder of Venture Centre, New Zealand Open Source Society and Society for Cooperative Housing New Zealand Council Member, Co-Organises Legal Hackers NZ.

Robert O'Brien (@wolstaeb): Entrepreneur and Financial systems Software Engineer (Financial systems). Extensive Blockchain experience and co-Founded three fintech start-ups. Co-Organises LegalHackers NZ.

Pascale Hyboud-Peron: Entrepreneur, 20+ year high-school teacher, and trustee of the Global Entrepreneurship Network NZ. Co-Founder of Venture Centre. Facilitates Young Enterprise NZ, NZ Startup Weekends.

We are educators with backgrounds in finance, blockchain, legal technology, publication media, and teaching. We are co-founders and entrepreneurs and part of a team many thousand strong.

Our Solution: Co-design Canvas, Card deck & Calculator tools for hubs that are easy to explain, customise & share offline for designing blockchain ventures.

Prototype the first Cardano Business Design Canvas and associated toolkit starting with a card deck, and calculator. An engaging pack of resources that can be used at local hubs, start-up events and hackathons. These artefacts kick-start a customisable open-source set of business model co-design tools that help entrepreneurs understand and explore how to apply Cardano's technology. They create a shared community language for the greater good.

Using these resources as facilitation tools will help people understand each other and the opportunities the Cardano platform can provide them in their particular problem/solution space. They aid the process of blending worldview, information, and expertise. They focus effort on experience-based learning by providing a fun way for people to analyse, communicate, and decide.

We have extensively used the Lean Startup Canvas[1] as a facilitation artefact in hundreds of Start Weekends[2] held across New Zealand. The Cardano Business Design Toolkit is inspired by and modelled after the Platform Design Toolkit[3]. A synthesis of the Business Model Generation[4], Customer Development[5], Design Thinking[6], and Wardley Mapping[7] applied to blockchain business models. The Platform Design Toolkit is inspired by analytical tools like Lean Startup Canvas.

The initial toolkit will include three components:

1. Cardano Business Design Canvas: A set of co-design templates and associated guides that help facilitate team discussion and analysis of token business models.
2. Blockchain Economy Card Deck: A set of design patterns and methods presented as cards that prompt discussion and investigation [8].
3. Startup Cost Calculator: A web-based tool to help entrepreneurs budget for the costs of setting up and running a new venture [9].

Our first test deployment of the Cardano Business Design Toolkit will be in Vietnam and Indonesia! Working with the Catalyst Eastern Townhall[10] to deliver their Cardano StartUp Week in February 2022. From there we hope to iterate and refine the toolkit and translate it into more languages.

What comes next: More advanced facilitation artefacts in the future will include;

1. A Token Economy Simulator - easy to use web-based simulator for designing the parameters of a token economic system and its costs.
2. Integration of Social Simulations[11] and Games[12] into the toolkit that helps teams understand the complexity and trade-offs in the designs by playing games.

A note about challenge choice:

We have chosen the Scale-UP Cardano's Community Hubs challenge for the core work in this proposal, rather than the DLT Toolkit Challenge. Our focus with these resources is 100% on scaling community hubs as the primary customer and use. With seven years of hands-on experience building community hubs at Venture Centre, we have a deep understanding of what it takes to build these hubs and what's needed to support emerging entrepreneurs. We want to onboard the networks of hubs we already work with, and the thousands of others around the world to Sale-UP Cardano in a fast, flexible and fun way.TODO: Budget, KPIs and Additional Details to be added.

Budget

Asking for $19,500. This funds @280 hours of work @$70p/hr for both research and development, and content creation over the next 3 months (23hrs a week)

Major Tasks

• Design research
• Case-study interviews
• Synthesis
• Prototyping
• Graphic design
• Content writing, editing
• Testing

Deliverables timeline

• Month 1 - Conduct initial interviews. First draft Canvas. Document Card deck and Calculator scope/requirements.
• Month 2 - Establish initial lexicon of patterns and terms for Card deck. Establish an initial chart of inputs for the calculator. Conduct 2nd interviews.
• Month 3 - Design. Copy editing. Testing

What does the future look like?

• Month 6 - Continue to develop the tools. Expand the project team globally. Instigate a plan for peer review and publishing of results achieved through use and dissemination of the tools through local hubs.
• Month 12 - Present the project, tools and frameworks at the 2022 Cardano Summit. Begin research and development of additional tools for the toolkit.

Why is it important?

People who participate and contribute to community hubs are interested in creating ventures which provide blended social, environmental and economic returns. They just need to know how to do that on Cardano's platform and very few of them are technical people with blockchain knowledge and expertise.

How does success look like?

The average person will be able to participate in a Local Community Hub event anywhere across the world and be delighted to find a familiar frame of reference for their work. They will recognise common patterns, language and symbols and so making human connections in new communities, getting started on the earliest stages of ideation amongst a diverse group of new people and team building to create ventures on Cardano will be simpler.

Since this will be a first-of-its-kind market design resource, we plan to measure whether or not it is successful in properly instructing entrepreneurs. Instructing them in the technical and economic benefits of Cardano.

We're using our experience with similar tools in the Venture Centre with thousands of entrepreneurs over seven years. That includes many StartUp Weekends that used the LeanCanvas.

Our access to a large community of social entrepreneurs means we are able to rapidly prototype and design the ideas with our local network. We also plan to use and gain experience with the tools, in upcoming events with the Eastern Townhall and also seek to help the Catalyst School to use and provide feedback.

The most important benefit an entrepreneur walks away with is an understanding of:

1. Platform business and incentive models for use and distribution. (Non-Blockchain)
2. How platform business models are enabled by token designs. (Blockchain)
3. How Cardano's Native Assets, Meta-Data, and Smart-Contracts are be used to implement token fuelled platform business models. (Cardano)

From these factors, Entrepreneurs can then take the framework, create business hypotheses and map them to a set of tasks needed to test their ideas and get their venture off the ground.

Following a well-trod path, designing Canvas, Card deck and Calculator tools for use by entrepreneurs, will result in a steady increase in Cardano-curious at the top of the funnel and converting them to Cardano-community members lower down, resulting in an increase in the adoption and awareness of Cardano, a key, a continuous overarching metric of success.

Key Metrics to measure

How many new Hubs were launched in the next 6 months?

• To be achieved by sharing the frameworks and tools around which Hubs can build programmes.

How many developers did this community-focused challenge bring into the Cardano ecosystem?

• To be achieved by using frameworks and tools in Hub programmes that bring Tech Entrepreneurs, Impact Entrepreneurs, Interpenuers and others together.

How many new users of Cardano were onboarded?

• To be achieved by creating a part of the programme/event an onboarding ritual

How many external organizations did this community-focused challenge bring into the Cardano ecosystem?

• To be achieved by using frameworks and tools in Hub programmes that bring external organisations together (as sponsors, mentors, advisors, judges and providers on the programme/event) to work with Tech Entrepreneurs, Impact Entrepreneurs and Interpenuers.

References

1. Lean Canvas - <https://blog.leanstack.com/why-lean-canvas-vs-business-model-canvas/>

2. Startup Weekends - <https://startupweekend.co.nz/>

3. Platform Design Canvas - <https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/toolkit/>

4. Business Model Generation - <https://www.strategyzer.com/books>

5. Customer Development - <https://steveblank.com/category/customer-development/>

6. Design Thinking - <https://designabetterbusiness.com/>

7. Wardley Mapping - <https://learnwardleymapping.com/>

8. Wise Democracy pattern card deck - <https://www.wd-pl.com/get-your-deck/>

9. Cost Calculator - <https://cardconnect.com/startup-cost-calculator>

10. Eastern Townhall: Connect East Asian Entrepreneurs](https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Connect-East-Asian-Entrepreneurs/369120-48088

11. Social Simulations - <https://socialsimulations.org/>

12. Legran Djeu - <http://legrandjeu.net/>

13. William Gibson quote - <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/>