Considering the multi-steps that BD involves before getting to the point of an announcement or even implementation, it makes sense to consider a multi-level approach to incentivising BD efforts from contributors. We can consider BD as a process that entails soft steps and hard steps. Soft steps like @incakolitazero pointed out involves things like research, communication, meetings, negotiations, planning, follow up, etc., while hard steps includes things like getting prospects to make an announcement or implement Push products. It wouldn’t be entirely wrong to argue that the soft steps involve much more difficulty, time and work than the hard steps and even lay the groundwork for it. With our current approach, we would be incentivising the hard steps and not the numerous micro activities (soft steps) that help us achieve those hard steps.
An issue with our current approach is that it creates an incentive problem because we have to factor in all the efforts that lead to an announcement/implementation in deciding how much to give as a reward, and this would amount to either too big of a reward (bad for Push/the BD subDAO) or too small (bad for contributors). By focusing only on announcement/implementation, the current approach also creates a high barrier for reward on the part of contributors, which can discourage participation.
An advantage of considering a multi-level incentivisation approach that takes into account all the multi-steps involved in BD is that we can broaden the range of participation from contributors and widen the distribution of incentives among them. Also, it can facilitate division of labour among contributors for a single BD prospect, since different contributors can take on different activities involved in the BD lifecycle for a single prospect and can be incentivised for it, as opposed to a single contributor handling a BD process from start to finish and getting all the incentives for themselves (there are obviously cases where this approach is favoured). There are other advantages such as encouraging participation from first-timers since BD is broken down into different activities that they can choose from based on their strengths and weaknesses, etc, etc.
Conclusively, we can choose to design a multi-level incentive structure for BD as follows:
We can lump BD activities into three phases. Each phase contains activities that receives a reward. The subDAO can always include more activities and decide what phase they come under, as well as the size of the reward
