Collaboration has always been an important part of entrepreneurship. It is a cost-effective method for achieving business objectives that the individual components would otherwise not be able to achieve. The different skills, knowledge, expertise, resources, and preferences of the components work together synergistically and complement each other. By enhancing the members’ economies of scale and allowing them access to certain resources, good collaboration becomes a win-win situation for all concerned parties, who all benefit from greater rewards than they could achieve alone. Even leading tech giant Google has revealed some surprising truths on how to encourage collaboration in its quest to optimize its organizational structure. What they discovered was that collaborations are most effective when discussions and relationships remain egalitarian.
Through its decentralized digital business model, TripleOne aims to combine such egalitarian collaboration with a variety of proprietary systems and technologies that will ensure its smooth conduct. Designed for users coming from all over the world, TripleOne’s business model promises all the benefits of collaboration through systems of communication that promise full transparency and equality with every business decision. By working through a single client in the form of the TripleOne website, its users are able to democratically decide on all aspects of running a business.
Such a structure ensures that all members remain comfortable suggesting ideas, commenting on the ideas of others, and taking suggestions and constructive criticism from other team members. This, in turn, catalyzes innovation by bringing in diverse ideas from more active members.
An important caveat of the above discussion, however, is that the benefits of collaboration come smoothly only with good collaboration. What most articles touting the benefits of collaboration fail to discuss is how this is actually very difficult to achieve with our usual systems. Research by the Harvard Business Review across 300 organizations shows how 20% to 35% of value-added collaboration comes from only 3% to 5% of employees. A significant part of this is attributed to the typical hierarchical structure of most organizations, something which has a notable tendency to stifle collaboration, as employees find it difficult to express their concerns even when given the proper avenues. In fact, many of us are all too familiar with company meetings that end up dominated by those in the upper levels of the hierarchy.
With TripleOne, users are able to participate from the very beginning by proposing projects and business ideas to the entire community of TripleOne users. Enhancing the system’s flexibility, there is very little in the way of hard restrictions for business ideas, with TripleOne projects allowed to be pretty much anything. From brick-and-mortar establishments to local businesses to investment opportunities in the form of stocks and real estate, any sort of business project has the chance to be accepted as long as it is found desirable by the overall TripleOne user consensus.
Such consensus is secured through a proprietary voting system that allows and actively encourages every user to vote on pertinent TripleOne business decisions. Every user is allotted a number of Normal and Special votes, each of which has equal weight and can be used to decide positively or negatively on ideas, projects, and other important decisions for TripleOne. Normal votes are allotted to users each month depending on their rank (a sort of “credibility score” in the TripleOne community) while Special votes are awarded for users who have made ‘correct’ votes (i.e. leading to a decision that would have turned out to be good for the TripleOne business) that went against the user consensus. The system for Special votes ensures that users do not simply vote with the consensus every time and encourages innovative and outside-the-box thinking.
Voting and overall active participation in the TripleOne system, on the other hand, are encouraged through different rewards systems that dictate how much of the monthly TripleOne budget a user is entitled to and what kind of perks a user gets. One aspect enhancing TripleOne’s egalitarian system is how active participation is the only contribution expected from each user. TripleOne emphasizes the fact that the company is funded fully by its own investments and financial injections from its founder. Aside from this, no other entities are allowed to invest financially into TripleOne and the company has no outstanding debts with any individuals or institutions. Likewise, users cannot financially invest in TripleOne, which prevents inequalities rooted in bigger shareholders having bigger decision-making powers.
To find out more about TripleOne and their decentralized business model, you may follow them on Instagram at @tripleone or visit their website at tripleone.com.