Redesigning the end-to-end service model of a sustainability venture support programme.
The Harvest Grant Programme supports researchers and early-stage innovators working on sustainability-focused solutions, helping them transform academic knowledge into ventures with real-world impact.
As the programme expanded, coordinating applicants, mentors, trainers, educational content, evaluations, and post-programme support became increasingly complex. The challenge was not only to improve the participant experience, but also to create an operational model that could be delivered consistently and sustained independently over time.
Working as Business Designer at Originn Creative Hub, I led the redesign of the programme's end-to-end service model. This covered participant journeys and mentor engagement through to operational workflows, learning tools, implementation guidelines, and knowledge transfer.
The outcome was a structured programme that improved both participant experience and operational efficiency while enabling the client to independently run future programme cohorts.
A meaningful programme needs more than great content. It needs a service model capable of delivering that experience consistently.
The programme brought together researchers, entrepreneurs, mentors, trainers, jury members, and foundation staff throughout a year-long development journey.
Many operational processes relied on manual coordination and undocumented knowledge. Every new programme cycle required rebuilding parts of the operation from scratch, increasing workload and reducing consistency across cohorts.
The challenge was to redesign the programme as a repeatable service that balanced participant experience with operational efficiency while creating a foundation for long-term sustainability.
In the programme's earlier form, operational knowledge lived primarily with the people running it at any given time. When a coordinator left or when the team grew, that knowledge did not transfer cleanly. Decisions that seemed obvious to those who had been there from the start needed to be re-explained, renegotiated, or simply re-invented.
Beyond the internal friction, this also had a visible effect on participants. The experience varied depending on who was managing which stage, and the level of support teams received was inconsistent. The brief became clear: the programme needed to work as a system, not just as a set of good intentions delivered by talented people.
Every stakeholder experienced the programme differently, yet every experience depended on the same operational system.
Before proposing solutions, I mapped the relationships between participants, mentors, trainers, jury members, programme coordinators, and the foundation itself.
Through stakeholder mapping, participant journeys, and operational process analysis, I identified communication gaps, duplicated work, unclear responsibilities, and opportunities to improve collaboration throughout the programme lifecycle.
Understanding how these relationships influenced one another became the foundation for every design decision that followed.
Stakeholder mapping in a programme context is rarely straightforward. Each group had its own definition of what success looked like. The foundation wanted scalable impact and operational independence. Participants wanted mentorship as much as funding. Mentors wanted meaningful engagement, not ceremonial involvement. Jury members needed clarity on evaluation criteria that could hold up across very different project types.
I used a combination of individual interviews, process shadowing, and journey mapping across each stakeholder group to surface these distinctions. The patterns that emerged pointed to a structural problem: the programme treated all stakeholders as audience members rather than as co-designers of the experience.
Designing for scalability meant designing for both participants and programme operators.
Rather than introducing more programme activities, the redesign focused on improving the quality, clarity, and consistency of existing interactions.
The objective was to reduce operational complexity while maintaining a meaningful learning experience for every participant. This meant stepping back from the individual touchpoints and asking: what needs to be true at the system level for this to work reliably?
The temptation in programme redesign is to add. More workshops, more check-ins, more content. But the existing programme already had rich content. The problem was not what existed, it was how it was held together.
I used a Value Proposition Canvas across each stakeholder group to identify misalignments between what the programme was providing and what each group actually needed. This exercise revealed that several of the programme's most demanding operational moments were solving for problems that stakeholders did not rank as priorities.
The design strategy shifted from addition to alignment. Each design decision had to answer: does this make the experience better for participants, and does it make the programme easier to run consistently?
The programme became a connected service rather than a collection of independent activities.
The redesigned programme covered the complete participant journey, from application to post-programme support. Each component was designed to improve both participant experience and programme operations while supporting future programme cycles.
The most significant shift was structural: rather than designing individual moments and hoping they would connect, the design started from the whole and worked inward. What relationships needed to exist between phases? Where did information need to travel? What had to happen before what?
The mentor onboarding process was one of the most underdesigned parts of the original programme. Mentors arrived with good intentions but no shared framework for what a productive session looked like. I designed a structured onboarding flow that gave mentors context on each team, clear expectations, and a set of facilitation tools they could use or adapt.
The mentor-participant matching process was redesigned from a manual, judgement-based exercise into a structured scoring system that accounted for domain expertise, industry experience, and team-specific needs. This made the matching process faster and easier to explain to both sides.
Progress tracking moved from informal check-ins to a lightweight scorecard system that gave coordinators a real-time view of where each team was in their development journey, without adding significant reporting burden to participants.
The final outcome extended beyond redesigning the participant experience. A complete operational toolkit was created to help the foundation independently manage future programme cohorts.
Rather than delivering only recommendations, the project concluded with a complete knowledge transfer process.
A comprehensive operational handbook, implementation guide, documentation archive, reusable templates, and process report were developed to enable the foundation to independently operate, improve, and scale future programme cohorts.
The documentation captured not only the final service model, but also implementation challenges, lessons learned, operational recommendations, and future improvement opportunities.
This became the project's most important long-term deliverable. The goal was not to produce a polished report that would be read once and filed. The goal was to create a living system the foundation could actually use.
Knowledge transfer in consulting projects is often treated as an afterthought. The main deliverable gets handed over, a brief training session happens, and everyone assumes the client will figure out the rest. Harvest was designed from the start with the opposite assumption.
Every process document was written for the person who had not been in the room when decisions were made. Every template included guidance on when and how to adapt it. The operational handbook was structured so that a new coordinator could pick it up mid-programme and understand what was happening, why, and what to do next.
The final week of the engagement was dedicated entirely to knowledge transfer sessions with the foundation team, working through the materials together rather than simply presenting them.
The project delivered a programme designed to continue beyond the consultancy engagement.
The redesigned programme established a structured operational model that improved consistency across the entire participant journey. By documenting processes, standardizing recurring operations, and developing reusable templates, the foundation gained the capability to independently manage future programme cycles. The project also strengthened collaboration between participants, mentors, trainers, and programme managers through clearer responsibilities and shared operational practices.
Designing services also means designing the systems that enable organizations to deliver them independently.
Harvest fundamentally changed how I think about service design. Creating meaningful participant experiences is only one part of designing impactful programmes. Long-term value depends equally on operational clarity, documentation, knowledge transfer, and the ability for organizations to continue delivering those experiences without external support.
This project reinforced a belief I now carry into every engagement: successful consulting is not measured by how long a client depends on you. It is measured by how confidently they can continue after you leave.