Blockchain Service Design: User Adoption Survey — Berlin Report 2019
This article wants to focus on three insights:
- Service Design could help to orchestrate the web of value-creation & stakeholders
- Action research to mobilize and pilot cooperation rather than competition
- Blockchain: a transformative tool enabling decentralization through open innovation
A view from above
In the last IBM Report 2019, it shows that more than 60 percent of early adopter organizations surveyed expect to have a blockchain network in production by 2020. Yet, the main challenges for corporates as much as for SMEs and startups remain: how to equip teams with a structured experimental approach to assess and enable the value for Blockchain. Service Design could address the recombining capacities and actors — with their needs — into new innovation ecosystems.
My journey to Blockchain Service Design
In 2018 I delivered training and experimental workshops about Blockchain with Gisma Business School. With Untitled-Inc, we explored tokenization. In late 2018, also, I worked in a blockchain fintech startup, STOKR. In January 2019, the time was ripe to test my vision and assumptions around Blockchain technologies impact. I wanted to pursue the following questions, goals: how can I create a map for (behavioural) change? How can I unearth pains and gains, unstated biases?. Desk research and action research are the methods that led to designing a survey, mapping the Berlin ecosystem. In my desk research, I chose — amongst many — two research papers that could back up my research goals, towards users and society. Martin Risius’ work inspired me to kick off the investigation. Fruitful telcom conversations brought to light further actions to discuss results and insights. Action Research is a form of inquiry where data is collected with research participants. It has four basic steps: plan,act, observe/collect, reflect/ review.
What We (don’t) Know, Where We Go from Here, and How We Will Get There
Marten Risius • Kai Spohrer — August 2017
Then co-creation came in to play. In January, on Medium, I received a comment to one of my previous articles from another professional on a similar mission, Gerrie Smits. With Gerrie, I could channel my perseverance. Excited and fascinated by his work, we could learn and inspire from each other.
In Berlin, my action research gave me the opportunity to connect with the startup scene as well as sharpen my critical thinking with constant observations and listening. This relentless curiosity brought up questions such as: how can we reverse this powerful networking events more towards the final user, with more active learning? This action research created an initial partnership with Konfid.io and a large number of participants for the survey. The Berlin Blockchain community flourishes indeed, Berchain paves the way to promote Berlin as main european Blockchain hub. However, there are aspects, gaps and opportunity to embrace: user adoption, blockchain reputation, storytelling.
The Survey Results
In March 2019 we launched the survey. And 21 Blockchain start-ups answered the Blockchain Service Design survey. The very positive participation led us to the following findings:
Insight 1
The findings strongly show that trust, immutability and transparency are the top three attributes that start-ups consider to be key USPs of their blockchain products.
Insight 2
In terms of barriers, the two highest score show ‘Usability and user experience’ and ‘Understanding and alignment with legal regulation’.
Insight 3
We also investigated on how teams apply tools and methods in their innovation process. The results highlight the need to develop and master more awareness of service design tools based on the users they are designing for and the complexity of the systems in which they operate: tools like Value Proposition Canvas are only used by the 5% of the respondents.
Identifying a viable business model is also another crucial strategic anchor to their USPs.
We believe that there is a clear indication to equip the blockchain team with more structured and dynamic tools to understand their users’ behaviours and needs. 8 teams of the start-ups that took part in the survey are interested in being part of either a Service Design program or interdisciplinary workshops. Trust, Immutability and transparency will be the pillars on which workshops will be delivered to train, improve service design tools and, to investigate pains and gains by generating co-creation with Blockchain teams and their users.
Service Design and its business value
This project pinpoints the crucial challenge of adoption as much as to embrace strategic lenses. As Blockchain will keep disrupting industries, we also move towards a service & platform economy, where innovation networks will thrive based on a dynamic exchange of resources. Taikai is an example. And of course, digitization of assets and representation of their value as a token is a key use case for blockchain.
If open innovation mirrors the distributed nature of Blockchain, the shift we want to address is to generate value exchange with multiple stakeholders, testing the problems and not the solution. The variety of open standards that provide exciting avenues to ‘code’ is not the only way to foster cooperation. The core challenge is to create a service mindset. Below is an example of how we envision an initial pathway applying Service Design towards user adoption. It happens inside a team first.
If Blockchain will unlock its power for participative ecosystems, it will have to humanise its technology. Everyone working with technology has a great responsibility to learn and practice to do so. An example of how multiple actors and landscape are merging is with Blockchain and Sustainability.
The results from the study sparks the impact of action research as a driver of change, to mobilize a pilot cooperation rather than competition. We want to facilitate co-creation with customers and stakeholders. This is the key to unlock blockchain’s real potential.
Our offer: where are we now?
We are currently developing a toolkit. Tools we’ve already identified are Value Mapping, Trust Personas, Trust Journey Mapping, Interviewing for Pains & Gains, Simple Token Canvas.
With these tools we plan to deliver Blockchain Service Design Trust sprints.
Our ambition is to facilitate teams to think more realistically about real user needs and stimulate the conversation about what it means to design for trust, transparency, immutability and — let’s not forget — aligned incentives in a network.
Our bigger vision is also to create open source tools that can help design and market more human-centric web3 solutions. In doing so we envision to further investigate blockchain as a transformative tool that enabled decentralisation through open innovation.
If you’re open to hire us, collaborate with us… let us know!
Renzo D’Andrea — Innovation Coach
Info@changetheriver.org — www.changetheriver.org
Gerrie Smits — Innovation Coach
