Spark Innovation Lab
This project was focused on researching, strategizing, framing and facilitating workshops for SPARK Innovation Lab in Auburn Ave., Atlanta, to help identify and develop brand awareness solutions for organizational growth and reach.
The client
SPARK Innovation Lab is an organization associated with Sweet Auburn Works that provides technical assistance and funding for retailers and entrepreneurs with storefronts in the Sweet Auburn District or those looking to set up a retail space in the locale. SPARK Innovation Lab offers targeted technical assistance, funding, and community support to small business owners in the district as well as those who wish to establish a business there.
opportunity
To identify opportunity areas for growth and expansion within SPARK Innovation Lab's current operations to ensure future brand reach.
solution
Through the insights generated from the diagnostics workshop, a co-creation workshop was designed and facilitated to capture key data points relevant in identifying intervention areas for the client.
Outcome
Through workshop tools uniquely developed and designed to gather relevant insights regarding brand reach, a framework was created to communicate the on-boarding journey of SPARK Innovation Lab to its incoming clients.
My roles
Researcher, Strategist and Facilitator
Through the course of this process, I researched and designed strategy for the framing of each client workshop to better curate the content to the client's engagement type. I was also a workshop host and facilitator where I guided the client through the workshop flow.
Brand Diagnostics Workshop
The Brand Diagnostics Workshop, curated by Prof. John Storey, comprises of a toolkit of activities structured towards helping a brand owner or stakeholder understand their brand better and identify potential opportunity areas.
Workshop Synthesis
Based on the synthesis of the Brand Diagnostics Workshop a series of recommendations were built, to create a list of actionable points that SPARK could take up.
CO-CREATION WORKSHOP
Based on the workshop synthesis, different activities were discussed and ideated. Each of these activities were catered towards deriving the solution or starting point for one of the recommendations that were provided to client.
Outcome development
The anchoring activity of the Co-Creation Workshop was the “Ideal SPARK entrepreneur journey”. The journey was modified into a two-part journey with seven stages that tracked both SPARK’s and the entrepreneur’s experiences and actions and every stage. Using the information and data points from the Co-Creation Workshop different areas for the awareness-engagement map were ideated, including potential opportunities to increase tourist footfall, so as to bring a larger number of people to the different storefronts of Sweet Auburn.
Measuring impact
Upon developing the outcomes based on the workshop insights, the prototype was presented to the client as a model to on-board their incoming business clients. The workshops and the data derived from them allowed for the framing of recommendations that were provided to the client for implementation at different time-based intervals. These included the allocation of a dedicated space for executing future workshops, as well as the onboarding of personnel for client management, both of which have been carried out in the months following this workshop series.
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