POISED FOR MORE
DESIGN STRATEGY CONSULTANT
Apr-Sep 2020
As the *School of Business struggled to keep up with challenges of the pandemic, it became imperative to restructure its innovation and entrepreneurship strategy for the next four years.
The project aimed to leverage the key strengths of the different research centers, accelerators and incubators of the school, located in two different states.
Key Constraint: We JUST hit the Pandemic! March 2020
As the sole 'Design Strategist' in the organization, with a legal and operational background, I was supporting the Director of Strategy for the organization, to chalk out the Indian Startup Ecosystem, understand its growing challenges and needs, and identify how the organization could address these needs.
Roles played: Researcher, Workshop Facilitator, Trainer, Strategist and Enabler
-33 programs
-Innovation and Entrepreneurship Strategy
-Brochure Design Strategy
(The client wanted to understand the best possible ways to market the 33 new programs)
​
Key challenge:
Virtual work was difficult, suddenly, for the large number of stakeholders involved
Solution:
Giving everyone the space to collaborate by enabling open conversation
DELIVER(ed)
Scroll to dive into the evolution of this project..
my process:
DOUBLE DIAMOND
Challenge Simplified
-Understand stakeholders of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem for the school,
-Identify challenges for each stakeholder, and
-Craft programs for collective benefit of all stakeholders
DISCOVER
Phase Focus:
Identify and prioritize the engagement with different stakeholders of the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.
My Role:
In hindsight, the process involved conducting collaborative virtual sessions with the team, to brainstorm and map out the stakeholders.
Virtually, this process was time-taking.
We then followed with a stakeholder analysis, to understand direct and indirect stakeholders, basis current engagement level with client. As we proceeded, I did some quick run-throughs with the team on conducting open-ended interviews as well.
DEFINE
Phase Focus:
Interview findings were mapped based on the stages of innovation and entrepreneurship. With major challenges and gaps arising at each stages, more than 50 unattended challenges came to light.
Identified: 6 focus areas to base programs one
My Role:
It was then required to chalk out a competition analysis, mapping different types of programs organized by various business schools globally. The idea was to understand how the 6 focus areas could be converted into stronger offerings for the different stakeholders.
Parallel to this, we also tried understanding the client and its offerings and identified three strengths of the client:
Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, Research and Implementation
DEVELOP
My Role:
Of course, I crafted​ a Service Blueprint
(I absolutely love blueprints!)
It identified:
- challenges across different stages of entrepreneurship,
- needs of the ecosystem that the client could fulfill,
- types of interventions needed,
- level of involvement by required at each stage of entrepreneurship by different stakeholders
and more.
DEFINE
Obviously, program design requires running through the same process, once again, to identifying the ecosystem, the target audience, the key offerings and structure, roles played by team and partnerships needed, along with the budget, resources and ways to measure impact for each program
- aka -
Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver, refine.
Poised for more
A take on what the Indian Startup Ecosystem could have been..
The *School of Business saw a change in management, in the next few months, after the programs were shared.
As the management changed, these programs were probably lost in translation.
What however remains is the in-depth study of the Indian Startup Ecosystem, as the pandemic hit us, closing all our doors. It also brought forward challenges seen across sectors, solved in these 33 different programs, that aimed to bring together strengths of global stakeholders of the ecosystem.