The tweet:

RnDAO is an innovation DAO, with a mission to empower humane collaboration. We advance this pursuit by delivering research and building collaboration tech ventures (organisational tools, community tools, DAO operations and governance tools, etc).

The problem (Why):

Organisational practices invented for the industrial era gave us economies of scale but at the cost of 86% of workers being disengaged costing $7.8 trillion per year in lost productivity. Billions of humans long for more agency and meaning at work. But addressing this challenge require us to fundamentally reinvent how we relate to each other and to ourselves.

Web2 tools embed Web2 principles. Permission-based access hierarchies, per-seat pricing models, email log-ins, admin accounts, etc., were all designed to facilitate legacy ways of working like top-down management and centralised teams. Conversely, creating tools for Web3 requires mental models of Web3 organisation. But these models are still emerging and require applying diverse expertise to avoid repeating history.

To invent better organisations and better systems, we need to gather learnings across organisational science, psychology and neuroscience, self-management practice, regenerative economics, and more. We must combine them with user research, DAO ethnography, rapid experimentation and tight feedback loops.

Problematically, this level of cross-disciplinary research and development is too complex a task for an early-stage startup and even a difficult one for any single DAO. But even if a single organisation achieved it, the output of said R&D is likely to yield insights and solutions beyond what any single organisation can capitalise on, resulting in inefficiencies.

The Solution (what):

We believe the best DAO tooling will be built collaboratively. Instead of doing things halfway, duplicating work, or reinventing the wheel, the projects that thrive will be those that work with their ecosystem, pulling resources together to lead the way in R&D and, as a result, gain positive feedback loops of talent, expertise, and better products.

A significant enough group of Web3 players have now discovered the value of inter-DAO collaboration and, as an ecosystem, we have now completed the first few inter-DAO research initiatives focused on DAO patterns and 'best practices' (e.g. Prime DAO's D2D research, the Governauts Rewards Systems research initiative). We're taking the next step to build on top of these initiatives and move from ad-hoc, waterfall-style research (requiring a lot of upfront planning and cat-herding) to ongoing and compounding, cyclical and iterative, R&D and venture building.

As such, RnDAO is designed to facilitate collaboration across organisational tooling projects, as a cross-DAO innovation community and venture builder, focused on solutions for human collaboration.

The innovation lab framework (how):

Many of the RnDAO founding team have started and operated innovation centres within Web2 and Web3. Our expertise spans design thinking, organisational science, human-centred design, Lean UX, and systems thinking.

RnDAO operates a continuous innovation feedback loop, compounding learnings and continuously refining our own process. We’re positioning ourselves at the cross-road of multiple research communities (DAOs, academia, self-management practitioners, etc). We combine and connect diverse expertise to provide meaningful solutions for DAO operations and help invent a humanistic, thriving Web3.

Concretely, at RnDAO, we:

  1. Identify shared challenges and bring together cross-diciplinary teams to produce in-depth research. E.g. previous projects on sub-DAOs practices and challenges, Web3 community health assessment, rewards & compensation, decentralised leadership, etc;
  2. Apply the learnings to incubate and build thriving ventures. See our current ventures here:

Additionally, we'll seek to 'drink our own champagne' by being users of the tools and research we produce. We aim to succeed by role-modelling progressive organisation practices and leveraging collaboration.