From a local problem to an impact venture
The DreamSpace Lifecycle is how DreamSpace Academy helps people build impact ventures: businesses or initiatives that pay their own way and serve a purpose beyond themselves. It starts where the academy’s teaching ends, for example at the end of the Changemaker Journey in the STEAM programmes.
Only people who choose to start a venture take this pathway. Others leave the academy’s education by other routes, such as taking a job, and those routes are just as good.
The pathway was once described as five stages in a fixed order: discovery, challenge-based learning, grassroots innovation, domain expertise and venture building. When the academy looked back at the people it had worked with, almost none had followed that order, and two of the five were not stages at all.
Challenge-based learning is a way of teaching, so it runs through every stage. Domain expertise is specialist help that a changemaker calls on when they need it, at any point, sometimes without joining a formal programme. So the pathway now has three stages, with challenge-based learning running through them and specialist help offered as one kind of support.
Good experimental research shows that pushing people into starting a business when they are not well placed to do so can lower their income and their chances of employment[41]. Someone who finishes the Changemaker Journey with real skills and takes a job has succeeded.
How people enter the pathway
Discovered
People are found through outreach, bootcamps, open events and discovery workshops. This was the usual route in the past, and it worked. But it depends on finding people who arrive already motivated, and nobody can predict how many will turn up.
Co-created
In the STEAM programmes, the Changemaker Journey builds the motivation instead of searching for it. Its Explorer, Maker and Innovator stages produce people who have already chosen to work on something real. This is how the academy works now. Finding changemakers becomes a matter of running the programme well, not of waiting for the right person.
The hardest part was finding changemakers. Labs, funding and the curriculum were less of a problem. Reaching people was not hard either: field visits, open application calls and bootcamps brought in large numbers. The hard part was waiting for people who were already motivated to come forward. That made the supply unpredictable and tiring to keep up.
There is a third, rarer route: scouted. Here someone is found through work they had already published on their own, without ever attending anything. It is different from discovery, and it has happened only a few times.
Grassroots innovation networks elsewhere do the same when they seek out people who have already invented something on their own[47]. So the academy mostly builds grassroots innovators, and occasionally finds them.
A person who enters this pathway is a Changemaker Candidate. They have shown motivation and commitment, but they are not yet a Changemaker.
Grassroots innovation: becoming a Changemaker
A Changemaker Candidate becomes a Changemaker by producing a grassroots innovation. Time spent, a finished course or good intentions do not count on their own. This step is called the gate.
The innovation can be a product, a service or an initiative. It must pass all three tests:
- The problem came from the community.
- A real user who is not on the project team has tested it.
- Someone depends on the outcome.
It rules out work built around a problem that did not come from a community. When the academy checked past projects against these tests, the most common reason for failing was the first test. The problem had come from a competition brief, a funder’s call, a lab exercise or the maker’s own curiosity, not from a community. The first test catches that, even when the build itself was excellent.
It does not ask who first raised the problem. Mentoring and lab support are the normal way in here, and they do not affect the gate.
It makes the number of Changemakers countable. With a clear test, “how many changemakers” has an answer that can be checked. Without one, the number is just a headcount.
Grassroots innovation is the best-evidenced part of the pathway, with many projects to learn from. It is also the rarest stage for people here to complete. The academy knows more about where people end up than about how they got through the gate.
Impact-venture building: launching a venture
For Changemakers who take the venture route, the third stage is launching and growing something that pays its own way and serves a purpose beyond making money. The academy does not put every founder through one programme. It designs separate programmes for this stage, and a startup challenge with seed funding is one of them.
Progress here is measured by whether the venture is operating and whether its revenue and impact are being tracked, not by a graduation date. The academy reports ventures in four groups: active, dormant, closed or transformed. A list of only the live ones would give a false picture.
This stage tests the “Earn” hypothesis, the idea that making skills can lead to a living. It does not assume that the idea is true.
Challenge-based learning: the thread through every stage
In challenge-based learning, learners work on a real problem and learn what they need along the way[12]. It is how teaching runs at every point on this pathway, not one phase of it. Lab rotations, workshops that mix subjects, and challenge projects happen before discovery, during innovation and inside venture building.
Artificial intelligence is treated the same way. It runs through the whole pathway instead of sitting in one stage or in a space of its own. Anything that shows up in every kind of work is a thread, and drawing it as a stage would give a wrong picture of the work.
Support, in any order
The academy offers four kinds of support. A changemaker can use them in any combination and any order, before or after the gate. So far, nobody has used them as a fixed sequence.
| Kind of support | What is provided |
|---|---|
| Co-creation | Building alongside the changemaker: co-founding, joint projects, shared risk. The academy does not build it for them. |
| Bridging | Introductions to funders, specialists, networks and international opportunities. |
| Domain expertise | Specialists, including international ones, brought in to refine a solution when the work needs it. |
| Funding | Seed grants, an impact loan facility, and help getting in front of the people who fund things. |
Bridging is the kind of support most often named as what makes the academy different, yet almost no outside research has been found on it.
A search of nearly three hundred research papers found nothing under any of six related terms: broker, brokering, knowledge broker, intermediary, boundary spanning and translation. They have not yet been searched for bridging or linking social capital, so this is not the final word.
For now, the academy’s own experience is the only evidence available. So bridging is the first kind of support the academy is setting up a way to measure. See measurement.
Measuring how many candidates become Changemakers
Because the gate has clear tests, the academy can measure how many candidates go in and how many Changemakers come out. That is why the gate was defined so precisely.
There are two measures, not one. They answer different questions, and merging them gives a number that can go above 100%:
- Candidate conversion: the number of candidates who pass the Changemaker gate, divided by the number of eligible candidates. This is a measure about people.
- Innovation yield: the number of innovations that pass, divided by the number of candidates, per cohort, or per unit of time candidates spent on the pathway. This is a measure about output.
Both need each person and each innovation to be identified the same way every time, and a written rule for innovations made by teams. Until those exist, neither figure is published, because it would look more certain than it is.
Questions the pathway has not settled
- How long it takes is not settled. The length has differed between programmes and between years, so no single figure is given until it can be tied to a named programme.
- The conversion rate is not yet known. Until it is, the academy makes no claim about how well the pathway works overall. It says only that each part has evidence behind it.
- Too little is known about people who leave. People leave from every stage, and the reasons are not yet well understood. Every stage should record who leaves and why, and not every stage does yet.
- There is a gap after the Changemaker Journey. Someone can finish the Journey and not yet be ready for a venture pathway that lasts several years. A holding route catches them: alumni projects, workshops and assistant-maker roles. The gap is about readiness, never about age.