The Building Blocks Thesis – Deep-Dive Report

Over the past month, we’ve been building out the Building Blocks thesis on this newsletter. I’m thrilled to announce the  fully illustrated deep-dive report on the Building Blocks thesis is out.

In Volume One of the Building Blocks thesis, we established the idea as the next generation of open business models.

In Volume Two, we explained how solution builders should strategize their participation in a landscape powered by building blocks, both by leveraging existing building blocks and contributing new building blocks.

In Volume Three, we explained how the building blocks thesis is natively geared towards a less extractive platform economy, while also powering diversity of solution design and usage. We see this in the shift towards Web3 as well as the growing importance of public digital infrastructures and national digital stacks.

In today’s edition, we summarize the key tenets of the thesis and why we believe this is key to understanding future business models.

Read on to recap the key tenets of the thesis and get your copy of the report download the report here

Building Blocks Thesis Report-Sunbird-Platformation Labs

 

Key tenets of the Building Blocks thesis

 

 

1) Solutions are developed and consumed as bundles of value. The building blocks approach unbundles a solution into its core building blocks and re-bundles these blocks into diverse solutions.

 

2.) A building blocks approach starts with the universe of possible solutions and determines the common fundamental elements that constitute such solutions. It then goes about standardizing these fundamental elements and commoditizing them. This enables an ecosystem of actors who have the agency to ‘build-on’ using these building blocks to deploy solutions across varied contexts. A building blocks approach allows the ecosystem to build context-specific solutions (which preserve individual context) while leveraging standardized solution components (building blocks).

3.) A building blocks approach acknowledges that certain large-scale problems cannot be solved through central solution design and closed innovation. Instead, these problems require distributed solutioning through empowerment of a large and loosely connected ecosystem of actors.

 

4.) Building blocks should have three key characteristics: They are usable as a component across multiple solutions, they may be combined with complements and existing solutions to create new solution bundles, and builders may benefit from an ever-increasing library of building blocks that all adhere to common standards and specifications.