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.
<u>Please note: This proposal is part of a bigger picture:</u>
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.
<u>Why are we doing all this?</u>
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
- Making sure that the millions (billions) are wisely invested
- Enabling the future dREPs and Cardano governance-bodies in making data & fact based decisions
- Having major trends, risks and opportunities precisely analysed and visualised (collecting from a multitude of sources)
- Demonstrating this carefulness to regulatory bodies and professional clients (e.g. governments and corporations who rely on Cardano as public, permissionless blockchain)
- 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.