We have applied our rapidly learned knowledge to help start-ups, solve industry problems and guide public policy and we are proud to be useful or ‘industry engaged’ as we say at RMIT.
We are education focused having built the most comprehensive suite of business school course offerings in the world, from short courses to Master’s degrees thanks to Professor Stuart Thomas and Dr Darcy Allen.
Where are we going? What is our future state?
We have started with blockchain, and yes, it's right there in the title of our innovation hub that's now one of the pillars of D3.
Over the past five years we’ve built out a deep body of knowledge and experience about how that technology works in business and society. How to innovate with it and we are very proud of what we've done there.
But next, we want to push that knowledge, understanding and research capabilities, into specific domains. Our ambitions are towards integration and consolidation and new areas of applied focus. Knowledge with action.
We’ve begun to develop new fields of research we believe will be important and useful for Australia and beyond and our next steps are to consolidate our industry experience and academic leadership, to develop fields and applications.
For example: we are working on:
- Blockchain for economic development (DeFi)
- Blockchains for social good/ charities/ volunteers (NFTs, tokenomics)Stablecoins and CBDCs (Digital Finance CRC)
- Web3 marketing (NFTs, social tokens)
- Web3 strategy
- New property rights (NFTs, registries and data DAOs)
- Linking digital and physical economy (hardware, NFTs)
- Designing crypto tax law
- Fighting crypto crime
- Foundations (private provision of public goods) (DAOs)
- Web3 governance (with ADMS/ DERC)
- Decentralised Science (DeSci)
- New measures of the digital economy
- Quantum computing and blockchain geopolitics
BIH help build useful things for the digital economy which perhaps look like separate problems and domains.
They draw on a range disciplines such as economics, law, accounting and finance and touch on a range of verticals such as payments and trade, creative industries, business services, insurance and health. But they are not separate – just different aspects refactoring the Economic Operating System.
Digitising all the parts and economic modules, enables a computable economy.
An economy is a computer. It is an operating system of rules consisting of some aspects of either/all of:
- human behaviours
- habits and norms
- laws and legislation
- organisational instructions
- market institutions
- code
An economy is a stack of rules for economic calculation/computation. But until recently, most of that computation was analog – slow, costly and fragmented.
Amazon is amazing for many reasons, but one is simply that it's a search engine for things in markets. All great platform businesses are like that. We need the whole economy to be like that.
What web3 tech or this supercluster is bringing, is a massive architectural shift in how an economy computes, and how it can do this at global scale.
This is what it means to tokenise all the things. To make capital computable, composable. To make infrastructure computable. To make innovation computable.
When the web3 tech revolution is over, we will have completely refactored and upgraded the operating system for the global economy. That is what we're doing here. That’s what D3 is built for.
Frontiers
We are working on the integration of blockchain with the full digital tech stack and developing a comprehensive theory and practical understanding of the supercluster.
It is a fast-moving technology and business space of cryptocurrencies, tokens, DeFi, NFTs, DAOs and the incredible advances in new ML models and applications to virtual economies (AR/VR/metaverse) and integration with real economies.
The frontier is economic design – the ability to build your own economy.
The supercluster is the convergence of these tools, toolkits and toolsets. Our purpose is to understand how to use them well, to understand their properties and to teach these.
These powerful design tools are not just for business but also for clubs, groups of people with a common project, civil society, charities and platform organisations including universities! These are tools to keep track of facts and to design incentives.
D3 is fundamentally inspired by a design school. A business design institute for the new era of composable economic infrastructure. For building local, on-demand digital economies whenever a group of people want to come together to cooperate to create shared value.
Author: Distinguished Professor Jason Potts
More information on Digital3
