DLT360: Machines and the Metaverse

[IMPACT]

DLT360 was initiated by Heinz Gassner. Before starting DLT360 in fall 2021, Heinz was Senior Global Director of Digital Transformation of AB InBev's worldwide Supply Operations (AB InBev is global market leader in beverage industry). Prior to this, Heinz spent many years with driving innovation in the machine and equipment manufacturing industry. Based on this experience, the DLT360 team has access to a large network with renowned industry-leaders in this field.

This proposal explicitly addresses the huge challenges faced by machine and equipment manufacturers (often also called OEM's). Similar as the automotive industry (but with much smaller production-volume), this major industry-segment was historically focused on producing physical products. Main profit came less from the initial sales, but from maintenance-agreements and spare-part-sales over the machine's or equipment's life-cycle (which can be 10 to 50 years). The digital transformation during the past 10 years has dramatically eroded this OEM business model, since the vendors were neither prepared for coping with declining spare-part sales due to predictive maintenance, nor for coping with 'pay-per-use' strategies pushed by some of their large customers. The push to requiring fully transparent digital twins for each machine or equipment is another big challenge for many players in this formerly mechanically-oriented industry.

With this project, we will investigate future strategies and specific opportunities for the machine and equipment manufacturing industry. Next to big challenges there are in fact great opportunities for those players, who do not miss the critical inflection point. While innovators in industry are slowly getting familiar with acronyms like DLT and Blockchain, the business-impact of WEB 3.0 and Metaverse is still largely unknown. Our goal is to run this project in close proximity with some large vendors and to integrate the findings into a comprehensive Whitepaper (as part of the Business Dimension of the DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar).

After this, the Whitepaper will serve as basis for establishing active cooperation projects with major players in this industry by driving further activities such as working on more specific Implementation Yellowpapers, Implementation Blueprints and Consulting Artifacts.

Please note: This proposal is part of a bigger picture:

The basic setup of the DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar was funded in fund 6 and greatly supported by a number of projects in fund 7. Fund 8 will hopefully let us continue and finally get to the status of mature, subscription-based services. Our initial work of fund 6 will be completed by approximately end of Q1/2022 with a first 360-degree roundtrip-video and roundtrip-presentation.

Why are we doing all this?

Cardano - similar to successful professional companies - needs to continuously investigate facts, trends, risks and opportunities. In commercial companies, this is typically done by independent risk-management entities reporting directly to the C-suite. With our services, we want to support Cardano in

1. Making sure that the millions (billions) are wisely invested
2. Enabling the future dREPs and Cardano governance-bodies in making data & fact based decisions
3. Having major trends, risks and opportunities precisely analysed and visualised (collecting from a multitude of sources)
4. Demonstrating this carefulness to regulatory bodies and professional clients (e.g. governments and corporations who rely on Cardano as public, permissionless blockchain)
5. Benefitting form continuously updated interdisciplinary perspectives in a PESTELE format (Politics, Environment/Health, Social/Reputation, Technology, Ethics, Legal, Economy/Business/Application Portfolio).

We are currently presenting our activities in form of single projects, hoping to overcome this stage with fund 9. At the end of 2022, we want to be a subscription-based service, also available to outside-Cardano clients worldwide (like commercial companies), becoming economically successful and independent from the initial Catalyst startup funding. Please also check and support our proposal for future subscription-based funding (Proposed F9 Challenge Setting:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400085).

We see the following aspects contributing specifically to this challenge setting:

• This proposal is not an isolated 'one-off' effort, but becomes part of an overall knowledge framework of DLT360
• We will actively reach out and integrate similar initiatives inside and outside the Cardano world
• We will do this in close proximity with leading machine and equipment manufacturing companies
• The work will be done and guided by experts with deep domain knowledge
• Our goal is to trigger tangible next steps with industry partners and consulting firms based on this work

No specific challenges and risks, as we are handling this as part of our ongoing DLT360 journey. Main challenge comes form the need to pack our activities into single projects, but we hope to overcome this stage with Fund 9.

At the end of 2022, we want to be a subscription-based service, also available to outside-Cardano clients worldwide (like commercial companies), becoming an economically successful service-provider, independent from the initial Catalyst startup funding. 

[FEASIBILITY]

The DLT360 team is applying a Business Model Canvas (in MIRO) for continuously optimising the overall business model approach. As most of our activities are highly interlinked, we see overlapping as well as specific elements when looking at the business model canvas project-by-project. Therefore, this part contains both: Generic and specific elements:

1) Customer Segments / Target Groups (generic for DLT360)

• Selected industry-clients, major consulting firms, universities, regulatory bodies, DLT-relevant public, selected high-quality YouTube channels and more.
• CARDANO-related projects in the need to perform ongoing risk & opportunity management
• CARDANO Community

2) Value Proposition (generic for DLT360)

Dependent of the above listed customer-segments, we see our value proposition as following (more details in MIRO):

• Inter-disciplinary & contextualised inputs as basis for improvement proposals and for effective and efficient lobbying
• Enabling professional risk-management frameworks (e.g. ISO 31000 compliant)
• Creating value-adding Implementation Whitepapers, Yellowpapers, Blueprints and Consulting Artifacts

3) Distribution Channels (generic for DLT360)

Depending on customer-segment and corresponding value-proposition, the following delivery channels will be used:

• DLT360 WEB-site with a public and a subscription-based area
• Quarterly online-live and video-recorded reporting based on the DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar
• Based on case-by-case agreement: In-person presentations e.g. on selected community events or summits
• Integration into various Implementation Whitepapers, Yellowpapers, Blueprints and Consulting Artifacts
• Academic papers and submission of commentaries

4) Customer Relationship (generic for DLT360)

After handling our startup-activities based on fund 6 and on investments from Heinz Gassner, the fund 7 and fund 8 funding allows us to deepen our content-creation and to grow our team. Based on demonstrating the value we create, we are aiming for subscription-based service agreements in the future. The relationship with outside-Catalyst clients will be based on such subscription-based service agreements and on specific project-based agreements.

5) Revenue Streams (generic for DLT360)

During this early stage of our startup, we are fully focusing on servicing the Cardano Community. The fund 6 and fund 7 funding of our basic DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar will lead to delivering 2 quarterly reporting events (end of Q1 and end of Q2 2022). This specific fund 8 project will not be separately considered in terms of a revenue stream. We are applying a careful 'Lean Startup' approach during our journey for planning, checking and iteratively adjusting our Business Model according to our learnings, all documented in our MIRO environment.

For the time after Q3 2022, we see the following approaches regarding securing sufficient revenue streams for maintaining and growing our services as well as the required expert team and network:

• We have posted a specific Fund 9 Challenge Setting Proposal for simplified and more reliable subscription-based funding (Please check and support our proposed F9 Challenge Setting: https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400085).

• For outside-Catalyst-clients we plan to implement a revenue-ladder-model with basic content free of charge (as appetiser) and stepping-up subscription models for additional access

• Specific Consulting Artifacts and specific in-depth research for e.g. industry-clients will be charged separately

6) Key Activities, Roadmap and Deliverables (now specific to this project)

This proposal is driven by the Economy/Business Team of DLT360. This project requires the following specific key-activities - all during Q3 / 2022:

• Participation in the 2-weekly meetings of DLT360 Economy/Business Team
• Basic research by 1 senior domain expert & junior contributors
• Active efforts to integrate other projects and cooperation-partners
• Writing of the summarising Whitepaper
• Supporting of RADAR integration of this paper and all important links
• Supporting the integration into the DLT360 quarterly reporting
• Active role in sharing/discussing the content during the current quarter

Based on our listed key-activities and key-resources, we plan with the following costs (please note that we are in progress of setting up a formal company body and need to calculate with taxation according to applicable law):

• Overall project management, updates on MIRO (10 hours for USD 50/h) = USD 500,00
• Communication, social media and back-office support (20 hours for USD 25/h) = USD 500,00
• Various meetings & discussions including travel ( 50 hours for average USD 80/h + travel) = USD 4.000,00
• Basic research by senior & junior contributors (150 hours for average USD 80/h) = USD 12.000
• Active efforts to integrate other projects and cooperation-partners (10 hours for USD 50/h) = USD 500
• Writing of a summarising paper (75 hours for average USD 80/h) = USD 6.000
• Supporting of RADAR integration of this paper and all important links (10 hours for USD 50/h) = USD 500,00
• Supporting the integration into the DLT360 quarterly reporting (10 hours for USD 50/h) = USD 500,00
• Active role in sharing/discussing the content during the current quarter (10 hours for USD 50/h) = USD 500,00

DLT360 is operated by a core-team and by a flexible team of renowned domain experts as well as a scalable network of contributors from the Cardano community, from academia and from industry. For this specific project we plan with the following key resources:

• Overall guidance: Heinz Gassner, Malta, with more than 30 years of industry-leadership experience: http://linkedin.com/in/heinz-gassner-9540a241
• Senior domain expert: Thorsten Pottebaum, UK, many years of experience, https://www.linkedin.com/in/thorstenpottebaum
• Content & Project Management: Guilherme Peirera, Sao Paulo, http://linkedin.com/in/guilherme-pereira-da-silva-977a361a3
• Selected University Assistants & Students in Malta, Berlin and Sao Paulo
• Radar Tool Implementation: Elias Nassall, Student in Security Management, Berlin, https://www.linkedin.com/in/elias-nassall-227858231/
• Communication, social media and Back-office: Eduardo Nunes, Sao Paulo

[AUDITABILITY]

Most of Our DLT360 projects are highly interlinked and we handle the overall planning and tracking in our DLT360 - MIRO environment. Due to already running our fund 6 and fund 7 funded projects that way, we are well familiar with Catalyst Coordinator and acquainted with the relevant reporting processes. We are tracking our progress as following:

KPI Progress and Success Measurement (for our activities during Q3 of 2022)

• KPI 1: Size of our machine & equipment manufacturing related content-contributor network (number).
• KPI 2: Number of involved (major) industry and consulting partners (number).
• KPI 3: Progress of activities as outlined above (0-100%)
• KPI 4: Whitepaper & RADAR content-element created, quality checked and released (0-100%)

Our Definition of Done and our success criteria by end of Q3 of 2022 are derived from the above listed KPI measurement:

• We have grown our machine & equipment manufacturing related content-contributor-network (> 3 regular contributors)
• We have established active (major industry & consulting) partnerships ( > 10)
• We have achieved all our activities & deliverables as listed above (100%)
• We have created, quality checked and released the Whitepaper & a new RADAR content element (100%)

This is a new proposal, but the results will be integrated into the Economy/Business-dimension of our DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar (therefore, this is not an isolated 'one-off' activity, but an important building-block of overall DLT360 journey).

SDG Rating

To be completed.