Context

During the Climatebase fellowship – a 12 weeks program – I designed and proposed an ecosystem innovation sprint methodologies to embed climate solutions for systemic impact. The problem I want to tackle is how communities, teams struggle to organise themselves, with a lack of coordination on collaborative engagement and streamlined participation. Climate decisions that counts needs teams’ alignment, a culture of adaptation with sustainable business goals. They need facilitation to clarify, tasks, workflow and iterative approach for climate solutions.

Approach

I led the online ecosystem innovation design sprint with 5 steps – every workshop will last 2 hours using Miro boards – spread over six weeks. With Kinray Hub: Indigenous-led Klimate Research & Resilient Development , we worked on the challenge to figure how to build and activate a knowledge bridge between Indigenous knowledge and Western knowledge. This implied to ideate and discover potential business practices to regenerate alliances to co-refine climate technology solutions, food systems, and co-evolve carbon resilience benchmarks. A team of five people engaged in the collaborative journey to innovate through the following design sprint framework and tools:

1 – Understand; tools: Ecosystem mapping, stakeholders matrix.
Actionable Input: to understand and visualise an ecosystem. It aims to help you map the actors, infrastructure and value exchange across an ecosystem, so it can be communicated and improved.

2 – Define; tools: Business impact model and user journey.
Actionable Input: helps to understand what’s the problem you are solving, integrate sustainable and social strategies into the business model. Suitable for redesigning existing companies and initiating new ones, with a focus on people and the planet. It encourages new perspectives and serves as a roadmap towards a more inclusive and sustainable future.

3 – Ideate; tools: Project scoping & test card.
Actionable Input: Ideation requires alignment on roles and take ownership of the required tasks. Project scoping helps to get unstuck and excited about a collaborative ideation. Test card will guide the team with what, where and who to experiment. The intention is to run those experiments for 1/ 3 weeks and create accountability and tangible discovery activities to validate assumptions.

4 – Prototyping & Test; tools: Planning prototyping and learning card.
Actionable Input: highlights important questions, support a team to organise to answer them through prototyping and building knowledge relating to a new service ecosystems and help to articulate which hypotheses you went out to test, What you observed, discovered, or learned in the field, what you deduct from from those observations (i.e. the insights you gained from the experiment) and how you’ll act upon this learning (e.g. to improve your business model and value proposition ideas).

5 – Implement; tool: Service Blueprint.
Actionable Input: Displays the entire process of service delivery, by listing all the activities that happen at each stage, performed by the different roles involved. The resulting matrix allows to represent the flow of actions that each role needs to perform along the process, highlighting the actions that the user can see and the ones that happen in the back-office.

Outcome

Successfully, the ecosystem innovation sprint brought value clarifying three main actionable areas:

1 – Enabled the team to pinpoint, in the given ecosystem, opportunities along with stakeholders prioritization with a roadmap.

2 – We designed qualitative research to speak to the actors of the platform, detected in the ecosystem mapping: farmers and scientists.

3 – We clustered the next imminent design challenges for Kinray hub to thrive as ecosystem orchestrator: design onboarding processes for scientists,address and consider governance frames (how to decide and what to decide for example about scientist proposals).

It was exciting to apply ecosystem thinking to focus on specific problems in the relevant communities that might create regenerative values through knowledge sharing.

Kinray Hub will keep working on its vision embracing the above areas and potentially expand this collaboration with the sprint.