A canvas? No, please, not another entrepreneurship canvas… Playground Creation Story (2/3)

Searching for a tool that would be useful and with a potential impact

Once I got the main model of the Playground for Entrepreneurs up, I had it designed by an actual designer. By that time it looked like a kind of entrepreneurship canvas. I was still not sure what it was going to be exactly, but I knew I didn’t want to create just another ‘canvas’. Even though I had been working with the Business Model Canvas for a long time and I’m a big fan, after its success the word “canvas” just became so overused. Every consultant (in all shapes and sizes) seems to have created a canvas. Even though there are a couple that really makes sense, most of them are either too complicated, don’t make any sense, or copy-paste the design of something else (which, consequently, doesn’t make too much sense). They are mostly consultant’s toys and hardly ever scalable.

At that time the Playground looked like this.

Now although this was a good representation of my vision and it looked attractive, it still wasn’t too actionable. It looked like a canvas, sometimes people called it an entrepreneurship canvas. Actually I presented it at a TEDx Talk once Emprendimiento con el Corazón | Inge de Dreu | TEDxUniversidadEAN – YouTube

At this point, we still thought that we would use it as a model to sketch out a basic business model. A traffic light-type of color coding would indicate the progress of the entrepreneurs. Mentors would help them to develop more knowledge and experience in each of the areas.

So at that point, I figured it was a good overview and sort of a summary of what an entrepreneur needed to do and take into account in their early phase. Mentors and coaches would help them with it, probably, if they would be available. And even though this definitely was a basis, it wasn’t too dynamic. It was too general to be actually actionable or inviting reflection and a specific enough way. So the question came up, what do we do with it? How can we make it more useful? 

Deciding on what type of tool the Playground for Entrepreneurs would become

So rather not an entrepreneurship canvas. Workbooks came up. Educational programs. At a certain point, I even seriously looked into doing a Ph.D., focusing the thesis on this subject. However, academic investigation turned out too theoretical for me and what I was aiming for. 

So the idea of a game or gamified tool came up. After all, the aim was to give people a resource that would improve their understanding of entrepreneurial principles in a very early phase. So getting to the right mindset was important. Play helps to think more innovatively and experimentally, which is essential in an early phase. Getting people to take a chance.

Now, this was something I already had been doing as an entrepreneurship and innovation with my entrepreneurs for a long time. Stimulating playfulness and experimentation. It helps them to take initiative and come up with sometimes crazy, sometimes useful ideas.

So the challenge remained. How do we make this into a game, that entrepreneurs could use time and time again in order to progress their projects? How to facilitate them getting the right insights?