Phoenix TV China + Parsons The New School
Designing New Ventures through Tacit Knowledge Access
Role: Workshop Producer for ORGE Innovation
Innovation Consultant: Carlos Teixeira
Knowledge Brokers: Nelson Lo, Yingying Yang, Jingying Huang
Translators: Shinhua Dunn, Nelson Lo, Yingying Yang
Clients:
Phoenix TV is a private Hong Kong-based Mandarin and Cantonese television station which provides Hong Kong and mainland China a variety of channels covering topics such as news, politics, and entertainment.
www.phoenixtv-distribution.com
Parsons The New School is a leading design university based in New York City, most known for its programs in Fashion Design, Design Strategies, and Transdisciplinary Design.
ORGE Innovation Consulting is a design-led innovation consultancy that provides organizations structured methods to help them stay innovative. ORGE Innovation offers services in the areas of Knowledge Brokering, Open Innovation Consortium, Design Strategies, Project Framing, Innovation Capacity Building, and Leadership Mentoring.
Phoenix TV approached Parsons The New School to create a curriculum that would involve Chinese lifestyle, fashion, and media, with the objective to facilitate new business creation. ORGE Innovation designed a workshop using open innovation tactics to strategically apply participants' tacit knowledge towards the analysis of business environment trends, emerging users, and potential business opportunities. The final outcome was the design of multiple ventures that successfully blended the curriculum provided by Parsons with the objectives of Phoenix TV.
Open Innovation Consortium
By promoting knowledge exchange between the group of multidisciplinary experts chosen by Phoenix TV, ORGE Innovation was able to create an Open Innovation Consortium environment to facilitate the formation of new links between the participants, their communities in China, and their global networks.
Project Framing
Through Project Framing, ORGE Innovation was able to provide activities to participants that interwove and contextualized the newly-acquired information gained from courses in the Parsons program with experts' tacit knowledge and insights and inspiration gained through collaboration.
Knowledge Brokering
Knowledge Brokering was utilized to combine participants' internal knowledge as experts in the fields of media, fashion, and luxury branding with information gathered through the prompted exploration of Chinese societal trends and lifestyles. The fusing of this information resulted in the design of pursuable, sophisticated, and clear business models which could be elaborated and tuned through further analysis.
Workshop Structure
Trend Analysis
Activities were created to crowd source past, present, and emerging trends pertaining to technology, business, culture, market, and people. After these trends were identified, teams clustered these ideas under topics of their choosing to help frame their thinking and draw connections between trends.
Emerging User Definition
Potential customers and consumers were defined using image association tactics. The daily life of the target user, including rituals, problematic and smooth points, slow-down and active periods, and interactions was analyzed for design opportunities.
Opportunities Identification
Insights drawn from the trend analysis and emerging user definition activities were applied to identify individual, system, and strategic business opportunities.
Concept Creation
Content created through previous activities was used as guidelines for the design of the new business venture. In the final activity, a basic business model structure was created, including features, functions, value proposition, stakeholders, brand identity, and a visualization of the concept.
Case Studies Presentation
A case study presentation was shown to provide examples of real-world applications of the innovation workshop processes.
Role-Specific Tasks
Project Leader
I was responsible for the all aspects of the workshop, including finding and training Mandarin-speaking student participants, translators, and facilitators, designing the workshop and creating workshop materials, and coordinating with different stakeholders at Parsons The New School For Design. Unfortunately, due to a family emergency I was unable to manage the event on its scheduled day, but monitored it remotely to ensure that all aspects ran smoothly.
Workshop Design
Under the supervision of Innovation Consultant Carlos Teixeira, I designed the workshop activities, preliminary materials, and the workshop schedule. Further input was given by seasoned Knowledge Broker Nelson Lo.
Workshop Production
Participant recruitment included Mandarin-speaking students, Chinese translators, Knowledge Brokers, and photographers. Floor plans were generated to enable adequate movement for activities. Production schedules were used to delegate tasks and ensure that work was completed on time. The workshop plan was distributed to Knowledge Brokers and training for the workshop was provided.
Workshop Materials Creation
The final materials were designed by Knowledge Broker Yingying Yang and myself.
Team Recruitment and Training
This role included using my own personal network and connections made through Parsons The New School For Design to find Mandarin-speaking students to be included as participants for the workshop. Additionally, I hired translators to translate the workshop materials since the entire workshop was done in Mandarin, and hired and trained workshop facilitators.