The project kicked off on the 15th January with a couple of days at BMW’s spectacular headquarters, about an hour outside of London.

Most of the DOVU team are car fanatics, so seeing all the beautiful 2018 range in their ultra modern showroom and exhibit area as well as some really cool M branded bikes and accessories was an extra treat.

The introductory sessions revolved around getting to know our sponsors, the legal teams, the branding and marketing teams, and of course a briefing from the IT department on how we might work with BMW’s systems. We finished up with a presentation from BMW’s CEO of financial services Mike Dennett who explained how important the Innovation Lab was to the business how much support we had all the through the company.

Ten weeks isn’t a long time to get a pilot running in any size business, but working with a company the size of BMW we had to understand where the constraints would be, and to BMW’s credit they couldn’t have been more helpful in giving us access and time to whoever we needed to work with.

A lot of the startups come into the lab at quite a conceptual stage, with a less well defined idea of how they might work with BMW.

DOVU was a little different in that our value proposition was easily understood — using tokens to influence behaviour or gain access to data is easily applicable to many facets of BMW’s business;

Our challenge was more in finding a small enough test to be possible in the timeframe we had.

We got together with a handful of senior stakeholders from across BMW and ran a collaborative workshop to understand where the biggest pain points were for the business, where some of the most obvious areas were for exploration and what kinds of behaviours we could influence that would have the greatest impact on the actual value of the car.

The brainstorming phase

We discussed and identified a big list of areas to explore, understanding what data the cars produced and how fleet systems operated. One area of concern came up over and over across various departments.

Mileage.

Vehicle mileage has the most impact on the return value of a vehicle.

Cars with higher miles obviously have greater wear across many facets of the vehicle, from engine through to Tyres and even the interior. Used car customers far prefer lower mileage vehicles and are willing to pay market value for cars that fit within low mileage bands.

Currently the system to track vehicle mileage across fleets inside BMW is via a fuel card. When a driver fuels their vehicle, the fuel station is supposed to enter and store the mileage of the vehicle, also printing the mileage on the fuel receipt.

For a number of reasons including mistyped numbers, oversight or even just being too busy, this data is at best inconsistent but often useless.

Of course connected and smart cars track and store this information, but right now this is only used for diagnostics if the vehicle is brought in for service. Until that becomes readily available to the rest of the business with the drivers permission, this would ultimately solve that problem, but until then the problem is costing the business vast amounts in clerical overhead, time and of course money.

Given the current constraints of accessing that data it became obvious we wouldn’t have been able to automate the mileage collection process so we agreed on a more manual approach for the pilot to track this vital information in return for some token based rewards.

Our DOVU wallet is built to be extensible, providing an interface to any number of data collection or behavioural activities.

So adding in a manual data collection method to trigger a reward was relatively straightforward. The user was prompted each week by the wallet app to use their phone camera to take a snapshot of their dashboard at a specific time.

OCR and machine learning identified the numerics on the dash, converting them to an integer we can verify and save to the blockchain.

The user confirmed a correct figure before submitting, and within a couple of seconds BMW now had a reliable and traceable log of vehicle mileage on a blockchain. Smart contracts checked conditions were met and users received 1DOV for each submission.

Using gamification and encouragement through streaks we made repeat use desirable by earning more tokens for maintaining regular use.

A leaderboard for consistent users was planned but time got the better of us.

By the end of the initial ten week programme we had produced a custom wallet for BMW, co-branded with the Alphabet visual branding. The app was distributed internally via our enterprise accounts with versions available for iOS and Android users and the pilot continues to run so we can keep measuring how tokenisation can encourage people to carry out certain tasks or influence their behaviour.

Irfon Watkins presenting to 200 senior BMW staff in London

The conclusion of the first phase of the project ended with a final demo to senior BMW staff from across the World at the Tate Modern in London. As the only project to have successfully built bespoke product within the programme, the feedback was phenomenal:

numerous departments expressed interest in how they could use tokenisation to improve their own areas of business.

Next time: DOVU cup cakes

Post Innovation Lab we continue to work with BMW, and are excited to see how DOVU can be used across the company. #DOVUiscoming