“This is why I admire the Pentagrowth method, it fully embraces and applies our human selves and the way we interact with one another. It enables success because it establishes human realities in business,” says Areti Kampyli, COO at Alice.si.
Areti Kampyli is a serial entrepreneur with 16 years of experience in product innovation, complex social impact projects, and a track record of developing award-winning products. Areti is the COO at Alice.si, a former corporate advertising manager at Ogilvy & Mather and a former co-founder of Yasmo, a networking app, which she turned profitable in less than two years. As well as leading impact measurement innovation at Alice, she manages all client operations and has won several government Research and Development grants, including two high profile UK government grants and projects funded by Vodafone UK, and several Blockchain companies. She is a regular speaker at social and Blockchain conferences including Bond, the EU’s Global Blockchain Congress, and Coindesk. Areti holds an MSc in Media & Communications from the London School of Economics.
Sebastian Klemm: How did the Pentagrowth method become effective for you?
Areti Kampyli: To be honest, just re-reading the Penthagrowth method now, sparks so many ideas and aspirations on how to apply things in our business, but most importantly it makes me crystalise our direction.
For me, the Pentagrowth method teaches you how to admire and cherish the very humans you are serving with your business. It gives you that secret sauce of success, because it embraces humanity in the most honest, real, and natural way. The method entails 5 levers for growth – hence penta, the greek word for five (pente): (1) Connect Network, (2) Collect Inventory, (3) Empower Users, (4) Enable Partners, (5) Share Knowledge.
If you apply those 5 aspects in any human exchange, you will see that this is what we actually do in our everyday life. Take a social gathering or a party for example: You enter the party, you meet new people (you connect, you network). Then, through your exchange with them, you collect information about them (collect inventory). Your overall response to what these people tell you empowers them to share more (empower users) and brings other people into the discussion (enable partners). Then you move around the party and you present anecdotes of your exchanges with those people (share knowledge). This is how in a simple everyday context you have established yourself socially; you have made friends or maybe opened business opportunities. You established your product – in this example: yourself – successfully!
This is why I admire the Pentagrowth method, it fully embraces and applies our human selves and the way we interact with one another. It enables success, because it establishes human realities in business.
“For me, the Pentagrowth method teaches you how to admire and cherish the very humans you are serving with your business,” Areti Kampyli, COO at Alice.si
Sebastian Klemm: How did the Pentagrowth method support you in your project where you developed a responsible decentralized data ecosystem that reshapes humanitarian aid accountability?
Areti Kampyli: In our case, the Pentagrowth method empowered us to expand our vision beyond the objective of the DLT4EU programme, both in our product and our commercial outputs. We went beyond a data ecosystem that focuses on humanitarian aid accountability.
We enabled people to see the impact of their work in their data! We empowered actors in the impact space to analyse, visualise and match their data with the impact measurement framework of their choice in a fully automated and intuitive platform.
We applied the Pentahrowth ‘circle of value’ in the following way:
(1) Connect Network: As instigated from the DLT4EU programme we connected first with our customers, (in our case the Vodafone Foundation) before even starting to build anything. Working with the Vodafone Foundation and being directed by them, we created a #FutureThatRocks for our first group of users/critical agents.
(2) Collect Inventory: We collected our customer’s data structures, requirements and needs. And based on that, we started building the #FutureThatRocks for them. The result was the creation of our first schema of data analysis and a first visualisation pattern. Then progressively acquiring customers, we created multiple schemas of data analysis and visualisation layouts, in order to achieve the 3rd growth lever of the Pentagrowth method:
(3) Empower Users: We enabled users to import their impact data on our platform and not only automate their data analysis and visualisation, but also show them the insurmountable benefits of impact measurement. We enabled the impact actors to serve their beneficiaries a lot better and prove to their investors what they achieved with their money!
(4) Enable Partners: Alice brings all impact actors together in one cohesive impact ecosystem. We provide a platform for all impact actors to collaborate seamlessly under one roof. All stakeholders are invited on Alice to set metrics, to connect with data sources, to compare project performance, and share performance with investors. As a result, partners act as our product’s advocates and scale our product, because it becomes an essential tool for their effective collaboration with relevant stakeholders in the sector.
We are currently expanding to automation tools for environmental measurement. For that, we are working with Google to integrate their multitude of data sources, from open source databases to ML algorithms analysing drone images. Our aim is to bring into our platform data analysts’ and developers’ work that will serve others with invaluable data contributions. Our business model, at this point, will entail the distribution of rewards to those partners, which will further incentivise them to be the advocates of our product.
(5) Share Knowledge: One of the biggest issues with impact measurement is that we are lacking benchmarks, against which we can measure our progress. There are many impact measurement frameworks, yet rarely (if at all) do they have quantifiable indicators to compare our progress against. Through the data analysis and visualisation of more and more impact projects on Alice, we want to enable our customers and partners to anonymously share the benchmarks and indicators that they naturally create with the analysis of their own projects.
Our business model will also entail the distribution of rewards to our customers for their contribution, which continues to be anonymous as the rewards come in tokens onto their Blockchain wallets.
“Enable Partners: Alice brings all impact actors together in one cohesive impact ecosystem. We provide a platform for all impact actors to collaborate seamlessly under one roof. All stakeholders are invited on Alice to set metrics, to connect with data sources, to compare project performance, and share performance with investors. As a result, partners act as our product’s advocates and scale our product, because it becomes an essential tool for their effective collaboration with relevant stakeholders in the sector,” Areti Kampyli, COO at Alice.si
Sebastian Klemm: Now, that you learned the Pentagrowth method along one project of yours: How easily can you adapt your Pentagrowth experience for new business and project developments of yours?
Areti Kampyli: We just naturally uphold the five-step cycle of growth – the Pentagrowth cycle – onto our next development phase at Alice.si:
(1) Connect Network: New customers require the benchmarks that our existing customers create.
(2) Collect Inventory: Our customers use the benchmarks/inventories that were created and contribute more data points with the data analysis and visualisation of their own projects.
(3) Empower Users: Our customers attract more users, because they introduce new projects, new impact themes, and new benchmarking data.
(4) Enable partners: With the exponential increase of projects, data, and benchmarks, new data processing opportunities arise. As a result, our partners create more data processing schemas and more visualisation combinations. More partners promote their work through our product, a bigger community of advocates is built and Alice achieves exponential scale.
(5) Share Knowledge: The 4 steps above create this incremental amount of knowledge that can significantly improve the way we deliver impact programmes worldwide and can affect life-changing policies. Alice along with its customers and partners creates this upward spiral of knowledge and collaboration and builds such strong network effects that it is difficult for any actor to exist outside of this embrace.
Altogether, this is how we can achieve the most caring market mastery in 5 steps.
Download the Pentagrowth Report in English & Spanish here.
Contact Javier Creus in regard of the Pentagrowth methodology. Javier Creus is the Founder and CEO of Ideas for Change, and the creator of the Pentagrowth methodology. He is considered to be one of the primary strategists and thought leaders in collaborative economy, open and P2P business models, citizen innovation and the networked society.