Dave Pollard's papers on business innovation & knowledge management

	July 8, 2008

Help Me Design the Natural Enterprise Toolkit My first book, Finding the Sweet Spot: The Natural Entrepreneur's Guide to Responsible, Sustainable, Joyful Work will be published next month by Chelsea Green. The publisher is sponsoring a companion website/toolkit at http://naturalenterprise.org that is currently under development. I'd love your help with the design. Just as a reminder, the book has six chapters, as follows: The first chapter entails identifying your personal 'sweet spot', where your Gifts (what you do uniquely well), your Passions (what you love doing), and your Purpose (what is needed that you care about) intersect. It's a personal exercise. The last two chapters are operational advice, mostly for once you're up and running. Chapters 2-4 are collaborative processes, and that's where naturalenterprise.org comes in. The site will offer a simple set of tools that will help you find business partners, research unmet needs, and collaborate to explore solutions to those needs. The diagram at the top of this article shows how it will be organized. Here's a walk-through: naturalenterprise.org/community will allow you to offer and receive advice about Natural Entrepreneurship, and it will have three parts to it: ASK A QUESTION: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to pose questions about any facet of natural entrepreneurship, and others to offer suggestions in response to those questions. POSE A PROBLEM: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to describe challenges they're facing in the process of creating the work they were intended to do, and others to discuss these challenges and work towards resolution of them. TELL A STORY: Will allow anyone to tell a success story or a 'war' story (about failure) about their enterprise or journey towards entrepreneurship. naturalenterprise.org/partners will enable you to find partners for your Natural Enterprise, and it will have six parts to it: DESCRIBE YOUR PURPOSE: Will allow prospective entrepreneurs to 'publish' their identified Purpose -- the need they've identified that they truly care about, and which they have some Gifts and Passions around. This is to enable other prospective entrepreneurs to browse and DISCOVER PEOPLE WHO SHARE YOUR PURPOSE, and connect with them (part 7). DESCRIBE YOUR GIFTS AND CAPACITIES: Will allow you, once you've identified your Passion, to list the Gifts (that are also your Passions) you have that are in the 'sweet spot' i.e. 'on Purpose', consistent with the Purpose you identified. It will also allow you to self-assess your Capacities, from a list of twelve essential Capacities that the partners of any Natural Enterprise must have between them. These are the things you bring to the prospective Natural Enterprise. The book (and website) explains how, to find your 'natural' partners, you need to find those whose Gifts and Capacities complement your own, collectively providing everything that the enterprise needs without a lot of overlap. This will allow other prospective entrepreneurs to BROWSE your GIFTS AND CAPACITIES to see whether they are a good fit for their proposed Natural Enterprise, and, if so, connect with you (part 8). DESCRIBE GIFTS AND CAPACITIES YOU LACK: Will allow you, once you've identified your Purpose, to list the Gifts and Capacities you don't have, which are needed to complement your own in order to achieve your Purpose. This will allow other prospective entrepreneurs to BROWSE your list of NEEDED GIFTS AND CAPACITIES to see whether they are a good fit for your proposed Natural Enterprise, and, if so, connect with you (part 9). naturalenterprise.org/collaboratory will enable you to collaborate with potential enterprise partners and others to research and innovate, and it will have three parts to it: EXPLORE A NEED OR PROBLEM: Will allow you to develop, together with others, a better understanding of a possible unmet need that is 'on Purpose' for your prospective Natural Enterprise. CANVASS THE CROWD: Will allow you to poll all readers of naturalenterprise.org to gather 'collective wisdom' about the viability of an idea, about the future, about which of a set of alternative actions to pursue, about a subject you lack knowledge about, or about a market. RESEARCH A NEED: Will allow you to study a subject collaboratively, assign partners work to do, and collect the results of your research in one place for group discussion. It seems fairly obvious to me that for 1-3 we will need some kind of discussion forum, for 4-9 we will need a database that anyone can add to or browse in different ways, for 10 we'll need a wiki or similar tool, for 11 we'll need a survey tool like Survey Monkey, and for 12 we'll need some kind of project collaboration space/tool. The question is, dear readers, how easily can we pull this together without the need for a lot of coding? Can we use existing open source forums (as Dick Richards did for his book Is Your Genius at Work?), and open source databases, wikis, survey tools and collaboration tools, and easily put them within the site 'umbrella' so users don't get lost? If so, which specific apps should we use? If not, how much work would it be to pull this together? Category: Creating Natural Enterprises 11:29:07 PM  trackback []  comment []

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