About This Playbook

The Ecosystem Innovation Playbook came out of a project at Explorium HK. The first version was the team's attempt to document our learnings from launching Explorium in Hong Kong and share them with the innovation community around us.

Over the course of a few months in 2020, the playbook became a larger co-creation project. It captured the insights and experiences of over 30 innovation practitioners to become a repository of knowledge, practical tools, frameworks, and resources (i.e. what you're seeing now).

Our aspiration is that this will be a living and breathing concept. We hope that the playbook will keep growing and changing as we add more contributors and accumulate learnings.

Navigating the Content

Our assumption, if you're reading this, is that you're either very interested in innovation methodologies or about to embark on a project or journey that involves setting up an innovation team at your company.

In the guide, you'll find:

1. An overview of teams we have been inspired by and a view on the directions they have chosen. There are so many ways of positioning an innovation effort. We mainly look at four 'directions': insight and thought leadership; research and development; process and capability building; and new partners.
2. A blueprint for future innovation efforts — what are the considerations and the must-haves for setting up and running innovation teams. This section contains learnings for our next innovation initiative and further growth of Explorium.
3. The 'first steps' section can further help you localize your effort to your company, location, stakeholders, and ecosystem. These are seven simple steps to getting started: 1) mapping key stakeholders; 2) getting to know the stakeholders; 3) finding a starting point; 4) launching the first experiments; 5) creating a feedback loop; 6) creating visibility, and 7) defining your themes. We also share useful links to learning more.
4. In Toolkit, we get into more detail about 'how' to do the work. We cover a number of tools that have been useful to us — some borrowed, some built by the team, covering areas like the 'Pilot2Scale' POC process and rapid prototyping. There are again links to more in-depth articles we've written on this in our Explorium Intersections publication.
5. Of course, we look at our own history, too. Mostly being descriptive about our activities and frameworks — more so than being reflective.
6. In Resources, you can find further reading on innovation from a variety of sources, all recommended by our community of innovation practitioners. On the contributors' page, you can learn how to collaborate with us on the playbook.

It's been a great exercise putting this together and reflecting on our successes and failures. No doubt the latter outnumber the former many times over. Read this, and maybe you can avoid some of our mistakes.

What's Next →