The Digital Residency™ was designed to fill a specific gap in the current leadership development ecosystem. The six tenets below describe what makes it distinct from existing fellowships, executive education programs, and cohort-based accelerators. They are the operating principles of the Fellowship, and the discipline Fellows commit to when admitted.
Fellows are admitted with the expectation that they will open markets, distribution, or networks to Fellows in other countries, and be similarly opened to. This is not one-directional mentorship. A Detroit operator gains Accra. A Lagos founder gains Detroit. Reciprocity is the founding ethic, and every Fellow is asked to demonstrate their capacity for it during admission.
The Residency is anchored in the Triangular Trade of Transactions (TTT) framework, developed through Dr. Da'Cruz's doctoral research examining how founders navigate regulatory uncertainty in highly regulated and emerging-market industries. Fellows engage TTT as practitioners whose own cases sharpen and extend the framework, keeping the Fellowship intellectually credible and continuously current.
The Fellowship convenes monthly across the year, quarterly one-to-one with the founder, and in person across multiple cities. It is designed to compound the value of learning through sustained engagement rather than deliver it in a concentrated burst that dissipates after a single week.
Admission is by application and interview. There is no numeric cap on the annual class; the Fellowship's size is determined by quality of applicants and strategic composition. This preserves the intimacy of a private room while remaining responsive to genuine demand from qualified Fellows.
The Residency is rooted in Detroit as an anchor city, and additional Convenings are seated each year across the world, chosen based on the composition of the Fellowship and where cross-border opportunity is most alive. This gives the Fellowship a durable institutional home while remaining responsive to the geography of the leaders it serves.
Once admitted, always a Fellow. Alumni Fellows retain access to the global network and select Residency events across cities and years. Over ten years, this builds a highly curated body of cross-border leaders in continuous relationship with one another and with the Residency's intellectual and technical infrastructure.
The TTT framework was developed by Dr. Da'Cruz through her doctoral research at the University of Michigan-Flint. It examines how founders in regulated and emerging-market industries mobilize three interdependent resources to navigate cross-border transactions successfully.
The relational and interpretive capacities founders bring to regulatory environments. Not credentials, but the specific ability to translate context into action across cultural and institutional boundaries.
The regulatory, contractual, and institutional conditions under which transactions occur. In cross-border settings, terms are rarely fixed. They are actively interpreted, negotiated, and reformalized.
The governance practices, operating rhythms, and formalization moves that stabilize the transaction. This is where founders convert instinct into institutional form.
A scholar-practitioner global advisory where alignment becomes transformative action, at home and across borders.
The Digital Diplomat™ is a registered trademark of The Digital Diplomat LLC. © 2026 The Digital Diplomat LLC. All rights reserved.