Advancing Innovation Culture — Experience Teaming
How do you help the best be even better?
Make it stand out
A top university affiliated research center who needs to remain nameless to maintain their non-affiliated status—provides U.S. government agencies with deep expertise in specialized fields to support national priorities and technology development programs. Their key technical contributions to some of the nations toughest challenges short lists them as an organization that has the history, ability, and support to create world changing advances in science and technology.
Their leadership recognized that the while deep expertise was still the technical backbone of the lab, the future of groundbreaking innovation will rely on trans-disciplinary integration of teams.
We built and implemented a strategy to boost innovation by putting innovators at the center of the creation experience. Akin called on insights and expertise from Silicon Valley’s innovation front line to help set the lab’s challenges in context. Through our network of innovation practitioners, we exposed our client’s senior leaders to the unvarnished experience of growing a culture of innovation.
Through back doors of organizations like IDEO, Facebook, Google X, and ILM, Akin built a picture for our client to clearly see the cultural opportunities, ultimately establishing a set of principles that helped them envision a more intentional environment for break-though innovation to thrive.
Results
To bring this vision to life, Akin collaborated with the lab’s operations team to pilot the first experiment, called the Experience Team. Akin co-designed this completely new team within the lab’s campus of 6,000 people. The primary focus of this team is to optimize project team performance by eliminating barriers and inviting cross-pollination of ideas and engagement. The Experience Team is the first of its kind for the lab, to encourage better cultural systems, improve productivity, and increase cross pollination of ideas.
The pilot continues to evolve to address community needs. The team has created more consistent conference room experiences, reducing meeting ramp up times and spearheading the creation of a lab wide room booking tool. The Experience Team has taken a bottoms up approach, growing organically and gathering support along the way to remove antibodies to new systems in the lab. These Experience teams have made significant progress on making spaces unique to their inhabitants and more accommodating for work styles removing barriers to the community doing their best work.
Akin + UARC
Research | Strategy | Design | Naming, Brand, and Messaging | Team Prototyping | Coaching