Ecosystem Innovation Playbook
A Practical Guide to Starting and Running
Innovation Teams.
UX Strategy
UX Design
UI Design
MY ROLE
Service Designer
CLIENT
Explorium Hong Kong / Fung Group
DATE
June - July 2020
TOOLS
Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Procreate,
Medium, Notion
PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
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Designed and led creative direction of the product
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Put together the UX strategy that led to the playbook
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Conducted competitive analysis and user research
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Facilitated community workshops to gather user feedback and brainstorm new ideas
Are you an innovator about to start a new innovation hub or join one?
We were in the same shoes not too long ago. Explorium Hong Kong opened in 2018 and in the two years it operated, we tried, failed, and succeeded (on occasion) in helping the businesses of
the Fung Group innovate following an ecosystem approach.
We learned a lot along the way and in 2020, we created this the Playbook for Ecosystem Innovation to share back our reflections and suggestions — this is the guide we wish we had at the beginning of our journey. Read it, and maybe you can avoid some of our mistakes.
BACKGROUND
The Ecosystem Innovation Playbook was designed to share what the Explorium Hong Kong team, together with a group of innovation practitioners in our community, have learned about launching innovation teams and running innovation projects within organizations. While there’s no silver bullet when it comes to innovation, the playbook captured, in our experience, the most useful ways-of-working, processes, and tools that can help organizations along their innovation journey.
Our process included:
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Consulting our internal and external shareholders
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Competitive analysis of what's out there
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Many many brainstorm sessions
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More research
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Creating iteration one
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Getting user feedback
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Creating iteration two - the 'living' document
Condensing all of our learnings we accumulated over two years into one document was difficult, but we took an iterative approach to make sure we moved quickly. With just a team of three people, our first iteration went live after one month. By the end of the second month, the second version - complete with our community's feedback and input - went live on. Read on to see how we did it!
01 THE BUSINESS CHALLENGE
After consulting our internal stakeholders that included the Chairman, Group Managing Director, and Chief Operating Officer, we got to work. As the collaboration hub of Fung Group, Explorium HK had helped facilitate many innovation experiments within the company over the years. However, our small team had limited resources and reach, and our business leaders wanted to see how we could push our experience and know-how beyond the team. The challenge they posed to us was:
"How might we gather the collective knowledge across the team and share it easily with internal and external parties to inspire and drive innovation across our ecosystem?"
02 IDENTIFYING THE UX STRATEGY
A rough outline emerges after one of our many brainstorm sessions
With the ‘how might we’ set, we put on our empathy hats and focused on the UX strategy. We needed to understand how this product would be used, what pain points our users would have, and what tools they need to solve their problem.
The last thing we wanted to do was create a product that already existed, so to avoid this, we identified the top 10 innovation hubs that inspired us and did a thorough competitive analysis of their innovation capabilities, their projects, and their shared learnings. We conducted interviews with community members to ask what innovation meant to them and what they needed help with most when starting innovation projects. We went through our own projects and identified what processes and tools worked best when working with customers. Lastly, we pinpointed a set of models that could help scale innovation across regions and organizations based on our own successes and failures,
After analyzing the results from our research and running many brainstorm sessions, we narrowed it down to a playbook format and created a rough outline.
03 DIVIDE AND CONQUER
As the designer on the team, I needed to create a cohesive yet interesting and fun look for the playbook. My day-to-day design responsibilities usually centered around designing event collaterals and our social media campaigns so this was the first time I had the opportunity to design solo on a project of this scale (a much welcomed challenge, might I add). I trawled Dribbble, Pinterest, and platforms like Issuu for inspiration. I studied our brand guideline even though I already knew it like the back of my hand. When I got stuck, I consulted other designers on how to push the design further while keeping things on brand.
It took many iterations, but eventually after a lot of work and multiple rounds of feedback from the team, we got the design to a place we were all happy with.
Download Iteration One of the full playbook here.
04 MVP DONE, WHAT'S NEXT?
Screenshots from a breakout room during our Playbook launch
We presented the playbook to the stakeholders as well as our community and received lots of positive feedback. However, this was just the beginning of our vision. What we really wanted was for the playbook to become a living product – a product where our community members could take ownership and add their own case studies, tools, processes, and resources.
We gathered our most active community members and ran a series of workshops to get constructive feedback on 1) how to improve the playbook, and 2) gather ideas on how to make this a community project. We ran the workshops on Miro, and at the end of the series, we decided to move the playbook onto Notion.
The move onto Notion meant the playbook was now an open-source community-managed repository of knowledge, practical tools, frameworks, and resources. We could open up the playbook to multiple contributors whilst giving us enough control to ensure that the quality of information shared was maintained. The eventual goal is to have the Ecosystem Innovation Playbook become a product of its own and would no longer require maintenance from the Explorium team.
Check out Iteration Two on Notion here.
A snapshot of our discussion during one of our community workshops hosted on Zoom and faciliated on Miro
CHALLENGES AND LEARNINGS
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Working on this project as the sole designer was a challenge, but I had so much fun. Designing a playbook was a great way to get the UX experience I had been looking for. Being able to take creative direction in whatever way I wanted pushed me to try new design tactics and look beyond my usual way of doing things.
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The project took place during the height of covid, which meant I already had some experience running remote workshops under my belt. However, this was the first time I had to host workshop breakout sessions alone. A first but definitely not my last. It was a fun way to put my facilitation skills to test, and with a lot of prep work and planning beforehand, it went smoothly.
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I loved working with the feedback from our community and implementing all their ideas into the second iteration of the playbook on Notion. Being able to collaborate as an online community on Notion was helpful; however, being tied to using their template design meant using something that took some time getting use to. If we had more time to spend on the project, I would have liked to learn how to customize the design more.
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Collaborative whiteboard tools such as Mural and Miro are a great tool to use for facilitating workshops. After running these workshops, I felt much more confident in my facilitation skills. I even wrote an article on how to collaborate better using Mural – check it out here.
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We quickly realized that The Ecosystem Innovation Playbook would need constant work and upkeep. We were hoping to tap community leaders to keep it updated, but it was hard to build up the momentum needed for a project like this. Whilst this was beyond the initial scope of our project, I believe it could have reached its potential if it had been developed further.
Liked what you saw? Still have questions?
Get in touch at designwithyangie@gmail.com