 Hey, folks, Darryl O'Donnell here from Continuum Loop. Just wanted to do a quick rip through a concept called a minimum viable ecosystem. There's a lot of discussion right now on how do you really get going on designing ecosystems that have a chance of succeeding. So we're going to give you a little over five minutes right here. I'm going to follow it on with a video that relates to the ecosystem governance framework that you're likely going to need, but I'll cover that at the end. You'll see where we're going. So real quickly, if we take a look at what is the problem we're trying to solve in the especially the decentralized world, we're working and you're working to build a new capability for the world. You're trying to figure out what's going on and you're realizing you cannot do it all. It's just there's just too much to be done. Maybe you're not qualified to do some of it, but you know that you need other folks and you want to help attract those partners to help you do the build of this ecosystem, not to hire them necessarily, but to bring them in and have them build alongside you. First, you got to back up and say okay cool, what am I building? What are we building here? If you're building an app, you probably don't really you're not an ecosystem. That's cool. That's totally fine. If you're building a platform, you're likely not necessarily part of an ecosystem. You could be, but a platform is often just about matching customers. If it's a dual-sided market or it's providing a deep capability in a certain way that yes, people do build on top of, but they're kind of doing it in your own control of things, whereas an ecosystem is quite a bit different. So what's an ecosystem? First off, ecosystems are not platforms. Platforms can be parts of ecosystems and one of the key things about an ecosystem is when you realize you do not have the control you think you do. So when we realize that, it's kind of hard if you're a platform you think you're in control, you realize no, you're in control of a very small part of someone's world and when you step outside of the boundaries of your control, which is quite small usually, things happen. So ecosystems really are about roles and activities. Roles are the people, the companies, the software that does the things, the activities that are necessary in an ecosystem. Kind of lets you know the people and partners want to know what's encouraged, what's allowed, slightly different things, but also what's forbidden, what is not allowed in an ecosystem. You need to understand what are the rules? How do we interact? And as partners come in, they want to know as players in the system, how do they fulfill those roles that are in the system? How do they participate in the activities? What's their role in a particular activity? When we go back up to this Asm platforms world, they're required. You definitely need apps. You need software running if you're creating a decentralized ecosystem. You may need a platform because those are the things that handle the technical interactions in the data movement. If all we were doing was interacting technically and moving data, great. That's a commodity utility business and that's important, but it's not that new. You want your system to get there, but that's not how you start getting an ecosystem going. Because the apps and platforms really miss the subtle, the inevitable liability, indemnity and other governance issues that drive the real value creation, especially in the early days. That's what the business is. That's where there's the ability to add value and extract some of that value, share that value around. One of the key things we look at in overall successful tech is how do you start small? Well, starting small with an ecosystem is important, but it's not easy. And this is one of the reasons we're sharing these tools is that the early idea when we first start looking, hey, this is an ecosystem, we realize it feels so simple. But as we start to do some work, we uncover some complexities that we had no idea would be there. Those subtle interactions between parties, it's like things get tied into not really fast and it gets worse. The complexity just keeps growing. So then how do you start small? Our guidance and what we work with folks on is starting with the bare minimum. That concept is the minimum viable ecosystem, which is a critical tool. I'm going to give you a technical definition by a gentleman named Ron Adner. Ron Adner is a professor and strategy guru. Probably one of the sharpest strategy minds on the planet. He defines a minimum viable ecosystem as the smallest configuration of activities and partners that can create enough evidence of value creation to attract new partners. I'll unpack that a little bit. I talked about activities and roles. You and your partners want to know which roles you're working in each of you. What activities are you working on? But the goal is not to go and make a bucket load of money, change the world on day one. It's to create enough evidence that other partners will want to come in. This is a very similar concept to an MVP, but it absolutely is not an MVP, a minimum viable product. It is a minimum viable ecosystem. Let's be clear on how an MVP is not an MVP because ecosystem building is fundamentally different. Going back to what is an MVP, it is about trying to get your product market fit. It's about engaging with customers, getting the feedback until you know you're really nailed things. It's about exploring. It's about finding things and you do that by low cost prototyping, get out, get your rapidly iterate. The world of a minimum viable ecosystem isn't about that at all. It's about actually delivering a value proposition. It has to be full value proposition, but also attracting and aligning the partners that make that value proposition possible because they help you build out what's called a value architecture. If you're trying to do literally everything, Amazon could be your partner. You're paying them, but you could look at various groups to decentralize the ecosystem that are doing various different things in whatever industry you're in. There are other players who likely can fit in your ecosystem quite nicely because it's also important to know where we are building and where we're relying on our partners. Our partners want to know, hey, I'm here. I'm fulfilling this role doing these activities in the ecosystem. Are you going to come and cut my grass? Are you going to take me out later? Or is this a role that I can be part of? We're going to see this pattern just a few more times as we go through this and then we'll get another video out to you about the ecosystem governance frameworks, but I'll talk about that in a moment. So one of the key things we have to do is understand how does the minimum viable ecosystem get created? We know what it's about. We know what it's for, but how do we attract and align those partners? And how do we know where we should be building and how do our partners know where they fit, where they should be building? That's what an ecosystem governance framework does because, again, those ecosystems are hard, but once we get these frameworks in place, our partners can easily see exactly where they fit, where they're adding value and where they capture it, where that value is shared in the broader ecosystem, where they don't fit. This is as important so they know exactly if they're a square peg in the square hole, that's where I fit, but also where there are other opportunities that are either not being fulfilled, not being fulfilled well, because partners want to be in place where they can add the most value because they capture the most value. They want to be cheaper, better, faster than anybody else. So they want to see where these opportunities are to one start and then grow into those. So how do you get started? The real key, again, it comes back to attracting and aligning those partners is you need an ecosystem governance framework for your MVE. Governance frameworks are something we've been working on. I'm one of the co-founders of Trust Over IP Foundation. That's really our meat and potatoes is aligning governance in business with the technology stacks. We have this dual stack model, but a governance framework does a few things. And if we do it properly for a minimal viable ecosystem, we can keep it relatively simple because we're going to focus only on a few things. The key components in the ecosystem, the governed rules, those that have rules and we want to know what's encouraged, what's discouraged, the governed processes, those are the activities, as well as some of those artifacts that we're going to need that people have to look at, whether that be a glossary, what credentials in the it where there's identity. And if you're working on things like a taliprism, where does that fit? What are the assurance levels? Because that actually starts to dive into liability and identity, but these are the pieces you're going to need to go with. This is also what we're going to help show in the next video. How do we actually do this stuff? So again, Daryl O'Donnell, Continuum Loop. Keep an eye out for the next video. Again, it's about ecosystem governance frameworks and how they dovetail into creating a minimum viable ecosystem.