How the Lifecycle is structured
The DreamSpace Lifecycle is the route DreamSpace Academy offers to someone who wants to build a venture out of a solution they have already tested. It picks up where the academy’s education leaves off, for example at the end of the Changemaker Journey in the STEAM programmes.
Building a venture is one of several things a person can do next. The others are described under where people go next.
The Lifecycle has three stages, one thread and four support modes:
- The stages: Changemaker Discovery, then Grassroots Innovation, then Impact-Venture Building.
- The thread: challenge-based learning, which runs through all three stages.
- The support modes: co-creation, bridging, domain expertise and funding, available at any point.
Challenge-based learning is a way of teaching, and a way of teaching is used at every stage rather than at one.
Domain expertise (specialist knowledge) is something a changemaker draws on when they need it. Documented cases show people using it without ever going through the labs.
Both describe the whole route better than any single part of it.
How people enter the Lifecycle
People come into the Lifecycle by one of three routes.
| Route | How it works | How it is used |
|---|---|---|
| Co-created | In the STEAM programmes, the four stages of the Changemaker Journey build people’s motivation, instead of searching for people who already have it. | The route used now. Finding changemakers becomes something the academy can teach towards, not something it has to hope for. |
| Discovered | Outreach, bootcamps, exposure events, discovery workshops. | The earlier route, and the hard one. Waiting for people who are already motivated to turn up means nobody knows how many will come. |
| Scouted | Somebody is found through work they had already published themselves. | Real but rare: one documented case. |
The hardest part used to be finding changemakers. Intake was already open and brought in large numbers, but the academy had to wait for motivated people to appear. Building the motivation instead means the academy can plan ahead.
People do not have to start at the beginning. They can join at whatever stage fits what they are already doing. Some have joined at the innovation stage because they were already innovating, and some through the labs, as well as at the start.
Conversion: how a candidate becomes a changemaker
A candidate becomes a changemaker by producing a grassroots innovation: a solution to a local problem. Time spent, a finished course or good intentions alone do not count. The innovation can be a product, a service or an initiative, and it has to pass all three of these tests:
- The problem came from the community.
- A real user who is not on the project team has tested the solution.
- Somebody depends on the outcome.
This test decides who counts as a changemaker, and it is the best-evidenced part of the Lifecycle. Researchers use grassroots innovation in the same way: solutions that come from the community that has the problem, rather than being brought in from outside[47, 46].
Someone can build something technically excellent that did not come from a community problem and has not been tested by a real user outside the project team. That person is an Innovator, which is a complete place to be. Not every innovator is a changemaker.
In the academy’s own records, this gate is the stage with the least evidence. Far more documented cases show people at the last stage, building ventures, than show the step of becoming a changemaker. The route is best documented where it ends and weakest where it turns.
Venture building: launching and growing a venture
The last stage is for changemakers who choose to build a venture. Its aim is to launch and grow a venture whose main purpose is to do good for the community (an impact venture).
Progress is measured by whether the venture is up and running, with its income and its impact being tracked. The academy designs programmes for this stage, such as a startup challenge with a fixed maximum award, rather than putting every founder through the same route.
Ventures and incubation sets out how that works, and what the academy does and does not claim about the ventures it has produced.
Challenge-based learning: the thread
Challenge-based learning means learning by working on a real problem. It is how teaching runs at every point in the Lifecycle, rather than being one stage of it. Time in each lab in turn, workshops that mix subjects, and challenge projects all happen before discovery, during innovation and inside venture building.
The kind of learning matches where each person is on the Changemaker Journey:
- Explorer: hands-on exploration.
- Maker: project work with guidance.
- Innovator: project-based learning, set inside a real challenge.
- Changemaker: challenge-based learning that leads to action.
Support the academy offers along the way
The academy offers four kinds of support, in any mix and any order, before or after someone becomes a changemaker. Nobody in the records has used them as a fixed sequence.
Co-creation
Building with the changemaker: co-founding, joint projects and shared risk.
Bridging
Introductions to funders, experts, networks and global opportunities.
Domain expertise
Specialists, including international ones, brought in to refine a solution.
Funding
Small starting grants (seed grants), an impact-loan fund, and help getting funding from others.
Where people go next
After the academy’s education, people can go in many directions. The academy calls this an open outcome field: there is no fixed list of destinations. Routes people have taken include:
- building a venture
- research and university study
- activism and community leadership
- a job or freelance work
- working for the academy itself for a time (the route the academy calls Grow Your Own)
- leaving
These are examples. No total is published, because a count would make a list of known cases look like a complete one.
Only the venture route leads into the Lifecycle. The other routes are not failures: the academy records people who went into academia or a job as successes.
The academy does not yet know why learners who stopped coming left, and their feedback is the most useful there is. Without recording who leaves, there is no way to understand who stays. Every stage should record leavers and their reasons; not every stage does yet.
Conversion rate: how many candidates become changemakers
The conversion rate is the share of candidates who go on to become changemakers. Because the gate has a clear test, it is clear who is a candidate and who has become a changemaker, and both can be counted. Without the number of candidates, the rate cannot be worked out.
The academy’s past figures are most likely counts of candidates. The academy will recount them, then publish both numbers, candidates and changemakers, so that the rate can be seen.
The academy has not published that rate, because the recount has not been done. Once it is done, the rate will be published whatever it shows.