Enriching regional transformation strategy with clear links to value
Supporting state government, private enterprise and local communities to better assess the value of transformational projects.
CLIENT:
Latrobe Valley Authority (State Government of Victoria)
THE CHALLENGE
The Latrobe Valley Authority (LVA) was established by the State Government of Victoria to support the Gippsland region’s economic transition from the ageing fossil-fuel industry to new paths for prosperity. A key focus for the LVA has been to identify and advance competitive advantage opportunities and future investment in four growth areas: energy, food and fibre, tourism and health and wellbeing. To do this, the LVA has adopted the Smart Specialisation approach–an internationally trialled and tested method of bringing together industry, community, education and government to leverage a region’s competitive advantages.
As the Gippsland Smart Specialisation Strategy (GS3) mobilised and matured throughout 2020 and into 2021, the LVA and its partners recognised they had reached a new level of scale in their work. Delivering at this greater scale presented a challenge for the growth area team, who recognised their current tooling would be unable to effectively meet the greater depth and spread of needs driven by scale.
OUR APPROACH
Doing with, not to
The LVA asked STCK to help them respond to this challenge with an engagement designed to enrich their growth area strategy by:
Engaging key stakeholders and partners in shaping the definition of value for Smart Specialisation
Elevating how value is perceived by key stakeholders
Demonstrating and testing how value can be assessed through a prototype
Through our approach, we anchored the engagement with a series of three co-design workshops that brought together partners and other users to:
Consolidate and bring efforts from the previous three years of GS3 strategy to life
Engage the community to validate our understanding of the challenge and draw inspiration for value proposition design
Collaboratively refine and enrich GS3 value propositions, and help identify a lifecycle for these initiatives which would inform the design of an assessment mechanism
Test an assessment mechanism prototype in a real-world application that would allow GS3 partners to consistently assess growth area initiatives against the enriched value proposition and GS3 principles
It was through these workshops that we harnessed rich insight to help the LVA and their GS3 partners achieve several important strategic outputs.
Value proposition enrichment and artefacts
We recgnised the engagement and collaboration LVA and GS3 partners must undertake would benefit from first enriching both how they communicate and measure the value they deliver. To help in this, we created a series of strategic artefacts to help anchor GS3 effort in value, including a nested value model, value proposition laddering model, service value lifecycle and value proposition map.
Gippsland Smart Specialisation value proposition laddering
Assessment model, mechanism and artefacts linked to value
Because the GS3 approach is anchored in a commitment to iterative delivery of regional transformation that places a learning culture at its core, we recognised the LVA needed a flexible model that allowed value to be measured and traced to inform key decisions and help manage investment and implementation risk. This mechanism was brought to life through a delivery assessment stages model and a prototype GS3 value delivery assessment mechanism.
OUTCOMES
Crafting futures that stick
For the LVA’s GS3 team and their partners, this engagement:
Delivered a way to communicate clear, traceable value from system level, through offerings to enablement
Helped GS3 partners understand where they fit in the system and how they deliver to GS3 strategy and value
Clarified and enriched the roles of both partners and the LVA
Provided the GS3 team with a working and tested assessment mechanism ready for use in initiatives already in train
Set a coordinated path to further flesh out the assessment prototype as a minimum viable practice, enabling people to use it and testing to inform iteration to create a living service