Corporate success with new technologies starts with tracking new developments. You need to know what’s happening! New technologies like Crypto pass-through several levels of adoption. We have created the Flashstarts Levels of Technology Adoption model to track the progression of new technologies through a business.
Basically, corporate adoption of new technologies goes from unengaged to tracking to educational and on to experimental, tactical, and strategic. For a complete discussion of our FLOTA model please go to this link. As you are reading this post, I can assume you have moved past the ‘unengaged’ level and are aware of, and interested in, crypto technologies such as Bitcoin, Lightning, and Ethereum.
At this point, your enterprise should implement formal crypto technology information tracking. This step will keep your organization informed and current on new developments within the crypto space, which will enable you to continuously monitor for opportunities within your business for crypto pilot projects and/or tactical and strategic implementations of the various forms of crypto.
While there are numerous methods an organization could implement for crypto technology tracking, what I propose in this article is only one of several possibilities.
Step 1
Create an internal email list through which employees can distribute and share new developments within the crypto space. Any employees interested in following crypto can join this group and contribute information as they run across it. Developments can be both internal and external. External items might include news about new crypto developments in which internal items might include pilot projects focused on crypto, contributions by employees to the crypto sphere, or virtually anything crypto-related.
Step 2
If your organization uses social media tools internally such as Slack or any other discussion program, you should create a channel designated to crypto. Discussion forums can be a great place for people newly interested in crypto to ask basic questions and learn how to learn more. It’s also good for them for announcing crypto-based webinars or other educational opportunities.
Step 3
Create several Google Alerts. Create one alert for crypto generally. Create another alert for crypto within your industry. You can also create another alert for specific topics in which you or your business are particularly interested. Those alerts can then be used in multiple ways. At a minimum, they should be published in your crypto mailing list – direct the Google Alerts Daily Digest to your email list. Google alerts also allow the creation of RSS feeds from alerts and those RSS feeds can be creatively directed to a variety of destinations such as webpages. Also, slack and many other discussion forms enable the integration of RSS. The goal is to disseminate external news as broadly as possible to those within your organization who are interested in tracking crypto technology.
You may also want to create specific alerts tracking crypto and the names of your business competitors so that you can follow where they are in the adoption cycle.
Step 4
Set up internal virtual or actual meetups where employees interested in crypto can come to share and discuss recent developments in the space. Such meetups should occur at least quarterly, and if there is sufficient interest can occur every month. The organization should spring a few bucks for the costs of food and beverage to encourage participation. Rough transcripts, summaries, or simple video recordings should be posted in your discussion forum and email list for reference purposes and for those who were unable to attend.
With these four steps in place, your organization should be well situated to stay on top of any and all new developments within the crypto space. Bear in mind that you are monitoring the space to uncover new opportunities for pilot projects that may provide your enterprise with a competitive advantage, otherwise these efforts can become yet another Internet rabbit hole (YAIRH (Yet Another Acronym YAA!)).
