Welcome to our course on creating a strategic action plan for Blockchain in financial services. I'm Don Tapscott, and we've been on quite a journey together. We've covered a lot of ground. We've looked at a lot of case studies, and also the implementation challenges of Blockchain solutions. Now it's time to get personal. This is where the rubber meets the road, as it were, where you put your own ideas into action. We're getting into specifics here. The goals of this course are twofold. The first goal is for you to identify a specific need or problem in your chosen industry, a problem you can potentially solve using Blockchain technology. The second goal is for you to investigate possible solutions to this problem, and how to implement one of these solutions. You have the knowledge to do this, and we're going to equip you with some tools and the know-how to move forward. As an outcome of this course, you'll produce a strategic action plan. You will pass different project milestones each week, and we've designed the course to walk you through the process of developing your action plan, and will help you improve upon your ideas for the submission of your final pitch. First, we'll analyze the financial services industry, and identify a problem that the application of Blockchain technologies could solve. Next, you'll brainstorm ideas on applications of Blockchain technology within a specific market segment. You'll use a decision matrix to select the most promising idea to focus on. Third, you'll position your idea, and explain how it will create new value for customers. Finally, you'll plot out your plan for implementation, that includes the financial aspects of your plan, whatever else you need to bring your ideas to fruition. We'll show you how to use a couple of tools entrepreneurs use to organize their findings. First, there's the template for analyzing industries. We'll introduce a new resource to help with your analysis, it's called the Blockchain Case Commons. It's a repository of Blockchain use cases, and we've put a lot of work into it. It works like this, when you're doing your industry analysis, you will come across great examples of people using Blockchain technology to solve specific problems in financial services. The Case Commons is a place for you to share these examples, and to collaborate on research with your classmates. Here we're interested only in actual applications of Blockchain, not in thought experiments or opinion pieces. For example, if I were interested in say, Blockchain for peer-to-peer payments, I might add links to nanopay.net or to M-Pesa.in. The case commons is not for general resources about Blockchain, it's for specific use cases. Okay, so that's the Blockchain Case Commons. Next is the decision matrix. This is for choosing the best idea for you to focus on. You'll define the purpose and objectives of your idea, and you'll specify the target customers or audience who benefit from your idea. You'll write a statement of need and a statement of benefit for your idea, and you'll position your ideas so it's clear how it'll create value for customers. Finally, you'll write a statement of primary differentiation for your idea. As you can tell, there's lots of writing in this course. There's also a lot of peer reviewing, and we've provided rubrics for peer review at every stage. So you can see this course is all about collaboration. Then you'll assess the feasibility of your idea; estimating the funding needed, the risk involved, and the cost structure, and revenue streams. You'll describe what you need to change in your organization's current way of operating to pilot your idea, or how a new organization, a startup, can launch the idea, and how it would need to operate. Then you'll pull all this together into the final course deliverable. You'll prepare a final strategic action plan in the form of a presentation deck. Your presentation must synthesized all of the elements you've put together, and you'll be able to use this presentation to pitch your idea to your organization or to potential investors. Now, make no mistake, this is a meaty course. On behalf of our academic partner in Seattle, and my co-instructor, Alex Tapscott, thanks for joining us, and have fun. We hope that you'll see this as a real opportunity to collaborate, and to participate in moving this financial services revolution forward. First step is analyzing financial services. Let's get into it.
