The Startup Curation Project
Startup Studio as Container and Anticipatory Activity System
The Startup Curation Project aims to adopt Curativity Theory, Activity Theory, and Anticipatory System Theory to study Startup Studio. This article is an introduction of the project.
Contents
1. The Concept of Curativity
2. Startup Studio as Container
3. Startup Studio as Anticipatory Activity System
4. The Startup Activity
5. The Startup Curation Framework
6. Anticipatory Activity System
7. The Defining Zone
8. The Lean Research
9. A Sample of Data
10. Support Entrepreneurship Education
11. References
1. The Concept of Curativity
In 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity which developed a theory for understanding general curation practice. I have applied the theory to discuss Toy Design, Family Development, Knowledge Curation, Online Workshop, Digital Platforms, etc.
The core idea of Curativity Theory is very simple:
In order to effectively curate Pieces into a meaningful Whole, we need Container as Part to contain pieces and shape them.
The triad of “Pieces, Container and Whole” is the basic unit of analysis of Curativity Theory. Also, this unit of analysis establishes a new theoretical category at the ontological level. The concept of Curativity indicates to three statuses of things:
- Things-in-Pieces
- Things-in-Container
- Things-in-Whole
Curativity theory is all about understanding the structure and dynamics of these three statuses.
2. Startup Studio as Container
Last year, I started paying attention to Startup Studio. I realized that there is a good opportunity for applying Curativity Theory to discuss Startup Studio, Venture Capital, Startup Community, and Startup Ecosystem in general.
If we consider an individual startup as a piece and a Startup Studio as a container, then we can consider the Startup Studio Activity as Startup Curation.
In 2020, Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway published The Startup Community Way and adopted the theory of Complex Adaptive Systems to explain the evolution of an entrepreneurial ecosystem.
This book is awesome! It is a theory-based reflection.
Eight years ago, Brad Feld published Startup Communities which is a practice-based reflection.
This is an ideal way of producing knowledge for us. We need both practice-based reflection and theory-based reflection.
Since the startup community way is explained in both ways. The Startup Curation Project chose Startup Studio as the primary case for further research because a Startup Studio is a nested complex which contains several Startups as its parts.
The Startup Curation Project focuses on three questions:
- How to understand the startup’s daily activities?
- How do investors run a startup studio as a nested whole?
- How does the “investor — founder” conversation impact the Startup Studio and its Startups?
In order to answer these questions, I developed three frameworks:
- The Startup Activity Model
- The Startup Curation Framework
- The Defining Zone Framework
The Defining Zone Framework focuses on the “investor — founder” relationship within the startup context. The framework is inspired by the Anticipatory Activity System framework.
3. Startup Studio as Anticipatory Activity System
The framework of Anticipatory Activity System is inspired by Anticipatory System Theory and Activity Theory.
The above diagram is the basic model of Anticipatory Activity System. The center of the diagram is iART Framework. The name iART stands for i +Activity + Relationship + Themes. The iART framework offers an ecological perspective on Startup Curation. The term “ecological perspective” means the following three contexts of personal development:
- Practice context: the “Know — Act” ecology (Activity).
- Spatial context: the “Self — Other” ecology (Relationship)
- Temporal context: the “Present — Future” ecology (Time).
The four basic elements of the iART Framework are Self, Other, Present, and Future.
If we apply the iART Framework to discuss Startup Studio, then we can consider Investor as Self while Founder is considered as Other.
4. The Startup Activity
Inspired by Activity Theory and other theoretical resources, I developed the diagram below as a general model of the Startup Activity.
The model emphasizes six elements:
- Opportunity: a startup starts from a perceived opportunity and it may change its activity due to an emergent opportunity.
- Outcome: a startup expects an ideal outcome and it may face AN unintended outcome.
- Objective: a startup sets an objective to guide its daily activity and it may change its objective in order to cope with dynamics.
- Object: a startup relies on objects such as tools, materials, instruments to implement its activity and it may consider making objects as internal activities.
- Theme: a startup needs at least one tacit theme or implicit theme in order to connect the founder’s life theme, the meaning of the startup activity, and culture themes of society. The theme of a startup activity may be a sense-maker of internal collaboration and external communication.
- Settings: a startup is contained by various environments such as market, local government, startup ecosystem, community of practice, technological infrastructure, cultural movements, etc.
The dotted ellipse refers to Startup Settings.
5. The Startup Curation Framework
From the perspective of Curativity Theory, each startup is a nested whole which contains Founder and Product as its parts. A Startup Studio contains several startups. The diagram below represents this double nested structure.
I name the above diagram the Startup Curation Framework. The outer ellipse refers to the Startup Studio Activity.
We should notice that the Startup Studio Activity is a dynamic process. There are emergent relationships between parts within the double nested whole. This is the most important property of the startup curation. For example, how does a startup studio curate the relationship between its startups, its founders, and its products? How does a brand new startup studio attract founders?
6. Anticipatory Activity System
From the perspective of iART Framework, the “Founder — Investor” relationship and the Startup Activity form an Anticipatory Activity System.
I adopted Robert Rosen’s Anticipatory System theory for the iART framework. According to Robert Rosen, “An anticipatory system is a natural system that contains an internal predictive model of itself and of its environment, which allows it to change state at an instant in accord with the model’s predictions pertaining to a later instant.” In contrast, a reactive system only reacts, in the present, to changes that have already occurred in the causal chain, while an anticipatory system’s present behavior involves aspects of past, present, and future.
The above diagram is the basic model of iART Framework with some notes.
- Anticipation: A founder has an expectation of an ideal outcome in the future.
- Feedforward: the anticipation inspires the founder to make some decisions which lead to some actions.
- Performance: the actions lead to several activities which are perceived by others such as an investor.
- Evaluation: the investor could evaluate the founder’s ideal future.
- Reflection: the investor could watch the founder’s daily performances and review these performances and the original anticipation. If the investor is a formal investor of the startup. The investor could reflect on the decision too.
If we move from the Startup Activity to the Startup Studio Activity, then the investor — the founder of a Startup Studio — is contained in a large Anticipatory Activity System.
7. The Defining Zone
From the perspective of iART Framework, I use the Defining Zone framework to understand the “investor — founder” conversation in the early stage.
Though the framework is about the early stage of startup, I want to use The Defining Zone to highlight two ideas:
- I want to use the word Defining to emphasize the importance of the early stage of startup for the whole innovation system because most innovations are defined at this stage. Moreover, business innovations and social innovations define the historical development of human life style.
- The word Zone refers to an interactive space between two subjects with a shared activity in a short duration or long duration.
For Startup Curation, the shared activity is the startup activity. Two subjects are an Investor and a Founder.
The above diagram shows five developmental themes of the Defining Zone. Each developmental theme can be understood as a guiding question.
- Situation: Where are we?
- Orientation: Where should we go?
- Projection: What should we try?
- Engagement: How to find our sweet spot?
- Improvement: How to scale it?
The Startup Curation Project focuses on the Investor — Founder conversation and its impact to these developmental themes. We want to know the following facts:
- How does an investor answer these guiding questions?
- How does a founder answer these guiding questions?
- What’s the final decision?
- What’s the final consequences?
- How does an investor and a founder talk about the decision and consequence?
These questions are about Entrepreneurial Cognition. Moreover, I’d like to use the term Transactional Entrepreneurial Cognition to describe the “Investor — Founder” as a whole. Sometimes, a founder can bootstrap a startup without the help of outside capital. However, an investor always needs founders to accept his investments. From the perspective of investors, the success of a startup studio is based on the quality of the “Investor — Founder” relationship and the Transactional Entrepreneurial Cognition.
Both the investor and the founder need to optimal their predictive models. While the founder needs to predict market dynamics, the investor needs to predict the founder’ performance and market dynamics. The good news is that they can work as a whole and learn from each other.
8. The Lean Research
Though I prefer the practice study method which considers collecting data from daily actions of startup studios, I think the Startup Curation project should adopt the lean approach.
First, the Startup Curation project is an experiment of theory curation and theory-practice dialogue. This time I adopt three theories and curate a framework for studying Start Studio and Start Curation in general. These three theories are Curativity Theory, Activity Theory, and Anticipatory System Theory. This is a very exciting challenge!
The theory-practice dialogue refers to connecting these theoretical frameworks and the Startup Studio practice in the real world. If you are running a startup studio, you are welcome to support the Startup Curation project!
Second, I am an independent researcher. Now I don’t have a formal plan for this project. You can consider this article as a Minimum Viable Knowledge Product which has its original concepts, models, frameworks, and hypotheses. We can test it with real data.
9. A Sample of Data
What kind of data do we need? The Startup Curation Project needs many kinds of data, but we can start from one special type of data: the conversation about significant decisions. We need original proofs such as emails, meeting memos, reports, presentations, etc.
Let’s have a look at a sample of such data. In Feb 2012, Mark Zuckerberg had an email conversation about acquiring mobile app companies like Instagram and Path with David Ebersman who was CFO of Facebook. This week I saw some screenshots about the conversation on Linkedin. I’d like to quote these screenshots as an example for our research.
Email #1
Email #2
Email #3
Email #4
Though the conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and David Ebersman is an internal “CEO — CFO” conversation, it represents the “Self — Other” relationship within a formal business context. Moveover, it also matches our requirements:
The Startup Curation Project focuses on the Investor — Founder conversation and its impact to these developmental themes.and its impact to these developmental themes. We want to know the following facts:
How does an investor answer these guiding questions?
How does a founder answer these guiding questions?
What’s the final decision?
What’s the final consequences?
How does an investor and a founder talk about the decision and consequence?
The final decision of buying Instagram is a fact. The final consequences of buying Instagram are also known. Now we can share these email screenshots on Linkedin and reflect on our own decisions.
We need more such data for studying the Transactional Entrepreneurial Cognition and Anticipatory Activity System in general.
What if we collect 100 samples of such data? What if we collect 500 samples of such data? What if we collect 1000 samples of such data?
10. Support Entrepreneurship Education
Bill Aulet is the Managing Director of Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway quoted Bill Aulet’s 11 key lessons on teaching entrepreneurship in their book The Startup Community Way. Bill Aulet believes entrepreneurship education is really just starting.
Bill Aulet emphasizes that entrepreneurship knowledge does not come from a person, institution, or country, “We all have to contribute if we want to foster a discipline that is respected by academics, practitioners, and students.”
I think the Startup Curation project is also a developmental project for all participants. You can contribute to the project by collecting one sample of data. You can pay attention to biographies of entrepreneurs, online articles and podcast interviews. By connecting our theoretical frameworks and the real data, you are developing your critical mind.
11. References
The above discussion has mentioned several frameworks. The primary framework and Anticipatory Activity System and The Defining Zone. You can find more details about these frameworks from my recent articles:
Both these two frameworks are by-products of the iART Framework project. They were born from my writings about the iART Framework. You can find more details about the project:
- D as Diagramming: The iART Framework
- D as Diagramming: The iART Diagram Network
- D as Diagramming: iART Diagram Notation
- D as Diagramming: Tacit Trends and Shared Transformation
- D as Diagramming: The NEXT Way
- D as Diagramming: Meet with Martin Prechelmacher
- D as Diagramming: The Path of Creative Life
- D as Diagramming: The Life-as-Activity Framework (v2.0)
Our theoretical frameworks are inspired by three theories. If you are interested to know more about these theories, you can click the following links:
- Activity Theory (Activity U, Project-oriented Activity Theory)
- Curativity Theory (I wrote a book about it.)
- Anticipatory System Theory (Wikipedia, The complexity of anticipation)
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