Entrepreneurship in a Digital CBD
Author: Alexia Maddox (PhD)
I am the lead author for the Digital Infrastructure report which will be released in August 2022 as part of the Digital CBD Project . The question the report seeks to answer is - how we can create digital infrastructure to support a vibrant Melbourne? It’s a question I feel personally, having gone through two years of lockdowns with my fellow Melbournians, seen the empty shopfronts, felt the loss of music gigs and performances, and gained the ever-present Zoom-fatigue from working constantly in front of a computer. As a social scientist, I know that digital technologies are now deeply embedded into our everyday lives, economy and social practices. So whatever we do next, we need to think about how the digital infrastructure we build will be supportive of our wellbeing, our economic growth and be used effectively to alleviate the social problems which became so visible over the last two years.
We see the ever increasing role of digital networked technologies and know that we will be moving into the immersive environment of the Metaverse through augmented reality. The city will become a mixed-reality environment and there will be new and creative ways that businesses and people can engage, create together and innovate. One of the areas the digital infrastructure report will focus on is how to support a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem. Cities have long been the centre of entrepreneurialism given that they are effective at bringing together talent, capital and innovative thinking, and providing spaces for collaboration and knowledge transfer. The report will consider how digital infrastructures can further facilitate and concentrate entrepreneurship within the innovative pulse of the city.
For this case study, I have begun by looking at the early stage start-up experiences in Melbourne, with a focus on Web3 entrepreneurs. The early stage start-up experience is the point at which founders seek to define their business problem and cast around for what they need to know and who they need to know under conditions of uncertainty. It is a very exploratory phase, and even more so for those pursuing Web3 start-ups where so many more areas are in the “unknown potential” category. As with all entrepreneurs in the pre-commercial start-up phase, there is a substantial advantage for being first-to-market for Web3 start-ups, however doing so means that founders need to be prepared to operate at times in a policy and regulation vacuum and, in other ways, with increasing amounts of red tape.
When talking with Melbourne-based Web3 founders, this was often one of their first observations shared as they reflected on their experiences over the last six months. There is a substantial learning curve that a founder of a blockchain based start-up needs to go through in order to understand the potential of the technology and the potential market-fit of their product or service. Early entry in this emerging technology space means being prepared to take risks and build capacity for independent research to be able to engage with and evaluate the opportunities. While many of the founders I spoke with have engaged with accelerator programs, they’ve also used digital networked technology to establish global connections in order to collaborate, recruit talent and locate expertise on the technology they are building their business from.
One of the fascinating tensions that has arisen from the founder experiences is the way a founder develops a business idea within closed-group trusted spaces while working with an open and technically transparent technology, somewhat in the manner of open source software. Allen and Potts have referred to such spaces as the innovations commons for entrepreneurship. In line with this, founders continued to value the in-person experiences of conferences and networking, alongside the diverse and serendipitous encounters they can have in co-working spaces. To nurture those engaging in Web3 entrepreneurship, constructing these emergent spaces of trust, transparency, reciprocity and collaboration (innovation commons) may require a shift from us thinking just of co-working spaces and hackathons as key loci for the innovation commons to the whole Web3 spaces as an innovation commons. Consequently, the unique twist we are seeing in these era-defining times is the potentially new ways digital infrastructure of the future will be able to support productive and social entrepreneurship that benefit our economy and society.
Alexia Maddox (PhD)
Digital frontiers | Research methods | Online communities
For more information on the Digital CBD Project please visit The Future of the Digital CBD