Tools for Systemic Venture Building: Role Typologies

Published in

Metabolic Ventures

11 min readNov 25, 2022

Why identifying the role a venture plays can be so critical, and how to begin thinking about it

This article is part of a broader series about tools for systemic venture building. You can read our introduction or scroll to the bottom of the article to find links to other tools in the series.

Introduction

In the second part of our series on Tools for Systemic Venture Building, we will be talking about Role Typologies — what they are, how they can add value to our thinking, and ways to put them into practice.

The concept of a role is familiar — sports teams, group projects, jobs, and even camping trips all involve playing some kind of role.

Entrepreneurial teams starting a new company quickly encounter roles too — titles people take (“how do we communicate our roles?”), early hires (“what roles do we need to fill?”), and what value the organization can provide relative to others (“what role can we play in this project?”).

But, interestingly, it’s not common to think about the role a venture plays in a larger ecosystem of actors. Roles show up sometimes at the level of a supply chain (think “producer”, “distributor”, “retailer”). More generally, people typically talk about what they do: “We provide finance”, or “we build software”.

In the world of societal change, addressing social and environmental problems is inherently a team effort. Even something relatively straightforward like renewable energy requires a large group of different actors working together: from technology innovators, to scalable manufacturers, distributors, installers, maintainers, and recyclers, all the way to organizations working on policy and regulatory change, financing, and continuous innovation. If just one of these roles is not being filled effectively, the whole value chain is negatively affected, sometimes severely.

Identifying the right role (or roles) is partly about knowing one’s strengths and passions, and partly about understanding what the particular system needs in order to transition. This article is about why choosing particular roles are so important to a systemic venture, and how we can begin thinking about identifying the right ones to play.

Why Role Typologies

Thinking in roles is an underutilized approach for identifying an organization’s purpose and value addition in a system transition. Creating a venture that can contribute to transformative change involves thinking beyond the solution. We need to look at the organization and ask: What role(s) should it play?

Thinking in roles can be a useful tool, with the following benefits:

Systems Understanding
Working to understand a system is a lot of work and things get messy. Thinking in roles helps us apply and organize our understanding of systems. We can better map actors and think of value chains in a new light, while also drawing out insight about what roles the system really needs in any given context.

Transformative Potential
Moving beyond simply doing something “new” or having a “unique value proposition”, identifying the right role(s) helps ensure we’re providing what the system truly needs in order to change.

Identity Creation
Building a powerful brand identity, mission, voice, and broader messaging is made easier when the role you’re playing is clear.

Strategic Foundation
Choosing a clear role or set of roles essentially forms a bridge between a more objective theory of change and the more subjective theory of change a venture takes as its core strategic and operational basis. It helps us find clarity about where we should focus our efforts and innovate new solutions.

Collaboration Pathways
Finally, thinking in roles helps ensure we’re building with and upon the work and actions of others. It can also clarify the types of partners (and specific organizations) that we should be looking to work with to maximize our effect on the issue we’re working to address.

Using Role Typologies

Metabolic Ventures uses Role Typologies as a tool to personify core activities and think in a more focused way about purpose.

As a necessary caveat, it’s important to note that these roles are a work in progress, and they come from our evolving point of view. You shouldn’t see them as a complete set, and it’s probably useful to invent your own roles that feel critical to your context. For example, BuildingMovement.org has laid out a different set of roles worth engaging with.

12 Roles

The Resource
The resource provides a set of tools or digital utility that many people can access.

Examples: Coursera, Ifixit, Wikimedia Foundation

The Utility
The utility provides infrastructure for basic services like water, energy, nutrients, feed, connectivity, or resource cycling more broadly.

Examples: Weconnex, Biopolus, Linux Foundation

The Teacher
Unlike the resource, which is passively available, the teacher involves pro-actively training and knowledge sharing.

Examples: Girls Who Code, The Natural Step, Center for Artistic Activism

The Connector
The connector provides a method for connecting two or more types of actors who weren’t properly connected before.

Example: Matcha , Preply, Ruumi

The Exemplifier
The exemplifier inspires other actors through a working and compelling demonstration.

Examples: Commonland, Buurtzorg, Fairphone

The Activist
The activist works to enact new legislation, shift human behavior, raise awareness, or more generally put pressure on key stakeholders.

Examples: Client Earth, Extinction Rebellion, Tectonica

The Innovator
The innovator is primarily focused on the creation of new IP or recombining existing IP, whether for their own product/services or for others.

Examples: SRI International, Precious Plastic, New Story

The Scaler
The scaler focuses on creating economies of scale from existing product, service, or technology innovation.

Examples: SunPower, Desolenator, Sustainer

The Investor
The investor provides capital to assist the perpetuation of an activity, the growth of certain organizations, or an existence of an asset.

Examples: Purpose, Follow This, Landscape Finance Lab

The Researcher
The researcher unearths key insights that can be used in innovation and implementation.

Examples: Stockholm Resilience Centre, Croatan Institute, DRIFT

The Integrator
The integrator brings together existing technology and/or multiple models to provide new holistic value.

Examples: Medic.org, Mad Agriculture, BuildUpNepal

The Monitor
The monitor provides accountability of current power structures and validates claims.

Examples: Open Secrets, Transnational Institute, Global Investigative Journalism Network

Other Roles

Some additional roles we didn’t include (but you might consider):

Amplifier
Convener
Caregiver

How to Define Your Role(s)

Thinking about roles is best done at the early stages of building a new venture, but it’s also a tool that can be used anytime, particularly during moments of strategic reflection.

When thinking about roles, it’s important to know:

What the system needs
What it means to fully manifest key roles
How you’re emphasizing different roles if you’re playing multiple
How your role might change in the short, medium, and long-term

Playing a role the system needs

Key questions

What role(s) does the system need most?
What role(s) am I / we capable of fulfilling?
What role(s) am I / we most interested to fulfill?
Where can I / we find the most additionality in the roles we fulfill?

Meticulously search for roles — and ways to fulfill them — that land in the middle

Build objective understanding
As with a theory of change, to be smart about where to put our efforts requires an objective approach to understanding a system. This can be challenging and time-consuming work, involving a lot of good research and conversations with relevant experts, but it’s important to keep that lens of objectivity as much as possible.

From such an understanding, we can piece together a theory of how things can possibly change and a clearer sense of which roles are currently being played in which contexts. Then, we can better understand which roles the system needs most to bring about a genuine transition.

Get subjective, but explicitly subjective
With an objective approach to the system and what it needs, you’re inherently given more freedom to explicitly define what gets you excited and where you feel confident.

This is, in our experience, a fulfilling exercise. And it’s really important; it’s hard to stick with something or add real value to solving a problem unless you feel like it’s truly up your alley.

Maximize additionality
In the very middle of the above venn diagram is additionality: Roles you or your team can uniquely fulfill that are also needed by a particular system.

Within that overlap, there are likely to be multiple roles or combinations of roles you’re interested in playing and different ways you can play a role. To maximize additionality, we should try to do the things that are unlikely to have happened without us deciding to take them on.

Manifesting roles

Key questions

What does it look like to fully play a particular role?
What ideas and insights can we take forward in the design of our venture?

Look at one role at a time
Most impact-driven teams would probably see themselves in many of the roles above. But a little bit of everything can shroud what it really means to manifest a role completely. For the roles that you’re most interested in, try looking at them one at a time.

Think about what it means to go all-in on one role
For each role, explore what it means to put all your chips (IE, all your effort) into manifesting it completely. Regardless of which role(s) you land on, this exercise often reveals interesting ideas and insights you can take forward. For example, being ‘innovative’ is a lot different than producing innovations for an entire value chain in a way that fills a critical gap; similarly, connecting people as part of what you’re doing is quite different than imagining how you would fulfill such a role if it was your entire purpose.

Emphasizing roles

Key questions

What role takes priority?
To what extent are the roles synergistic?

Be clear about emphasis
While it’s possible to play just one particular role extremely well, most ventures are likely to play more than one role. Still, any venture is essentially playing a resource game. Without a clear emphasis on what role takes priority, opportunities and other dynamics can easily cause drift.

Understand potential synergies
Many roles can be synergistic, depending on how they’re manifested. While it’s not advised to force things, finding synergies between roles you intend to play can reduce the burden of playing multiple. And being explicit about those synergies can help build coherent and motivating workflows between teams.

Changing roles over time

Key questions

How might our roles change over time?
Do our roles fundamentally change or just the emphasis we place on them?
What external or internal dynamics are most likely to be key triggers for change?

Roles often change
Imagine a simple and generic example of a mission-driven tech company. The company might start with an innovation, perhaps ported over from a university, that solves a problem or makes a clear advance. From there, the objective might move away from innovation towards demonstration and piloting in order to show not just that the technology works but that new opportunities open up when it is applied in a certain way. With its value proven and demand for the solution on the rise, the company shifts its primary focus again to scaling its production and adoption.

While systemic ventures are often more complex, even this simple example underscores how roles of an organization, or at least their emphasis, change, and it’s important to understand what will cause them to change.

Game out what triggers them to change
In the above example, there is a combination of internal capability (the innovation works) and external dynamics (people want it) that affect how the company changes its emphasis. In reality, there are likely more (and more nuanced) scenarios to consider. As examples, imagine other actors shifting their capabilities. What happens if you find a partner who’s much better at scaling than you are? What happens if another mission-driven organization creates solves the same problem with a better innovation? The goal is to take a few of the most likely and important scenarios and think about how you might change the role(s) your organization is playing if they occur.

Integrating multiple roles

Most organizations play multiple roles, at least to some extent.

Take Purpose, which has popularized the concept of steward ownership in Europe and the US. We listed Purpose above as an example of an Investor because they operate multiple investment funds that provide steward financing for mission-driven ventures. But alongside playing the role of the investor and showing that they can make returns using their method, they also explicitly play the role of the Exemplifier. Purpose is also a unique kind of thought leader, providing both valuable (and free) resources for other organizations, as well as lobbying governments to provide better legal structures for steward-owned businesses. That means Purpose is playing at least four roles: Investor, Exemplifier, Resource, and Activist.

Another example is Mad Agriculture, an organization working with farmers to accelerate regenerative agriculture in the United States. We listed MagAg, as they’re colloquiolly called, as an Integrator, as it does three main things: 1) provides farmers with loan-like financing to help with an on-farm transition, 2) supports farmers with market access, and 3) offers agro-technical knowledge and guidance to farmers who need support implementing changes to their farming practice. That means Mad Agriculture is playing four roles: Integrator, Investor, Connector, and Teacher.

Both Purpose and Mad Agriculture have created unique teams and separate entities to house these different roles. It’s almost as if they’ve created multiple organizations to work together. But the roles they have decided to play, the emphasis they place on them, and how they fulfill them, has changed quite significantly over time. And other organizations playing multiple roles choose to do so integrated teams housed within one entity — an effective alternative approach in many.

When considering multiple roles, there is a balance to strike between too much spread on the one hand, and a narrow, isolated solution on the other. Try to do too much, and you risk being distracted and spreading your resources too thin. But on the other end of the spectrum, sometimes failing to combine other forms of interventions with your core solution will hinder your overall effectiveness. The key thing is to be making conscious, pro-active decisions about the role(s) you choose to play.

Conclusions

Role Typologies can be a powerful tool to help channel your thinking about the added value a new organization can have towards addressing a key problem or creating building blocks of a new economic system. Organizations can be effective at a narrow focus on one core role, or find coherent combinations with multiple roles — either at one time or spread out over the lifecycle of an organization.

The key things to remember are:

Successfully embodying a role or typology requires a unique set of skills and resources. As a venture team explores adopting a role, they should think about whether the team is willing and able to play such a role, and what resources it will require to fulfill it effectively.
The venture should always be cognizant of which role is or should be leading at any given time.
Each role should clearly connect to a key system need and adapt to the context of both time and geographical context.