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Fostering Virtual Collaboration for A Global Conference  

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“This virtual conference is the way to go and I think it will ease conferences in the future. After COVID, many of these bigger conferences and workshops will go in this way. People are more attentive, listen more and more engaged. 

When the UNICEF-AstraZeneca Young Health Programme (AZ YHP) Global Planning Meeting could not meet in person due to COVID, we worked together to design a new kind of virtual conference with collaboration, creativity and inclusion at the forefront 

A global conference to launch a youth-led advocacy movement for NCD prevention 
UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children&#8217;s lives and help them fulfill their potential. In a new partnership with AZ YHP, UNICEF tasked its country-level and regional-level teams with planning a multi-year initiative to prevent non-communicable diseases (NCDs) among young people. To launch this coordinated effort, UNICEF convened country teams, regional teams, partners and young people themselves, to establish the key pillars of this movement, share their activities, spark inspiration and foster collaboration as they begin this 5-year program. The resulting event was a three-day global virtual conference with participation from over 15 countries.
New constraints arise amid pandemic 
The COVID-19 crisis presented unique challenges for this global conference, which was forced to be held virtually. The organizers understood how valuable in-person collaboration had been for past conference goals, so they turned to frog to help co-create an entirely virtual conference using new digital tools, workshop sessions and human-centered design principles. We started by conducting a thorough technology audit to find the right platforms for the global conference. It was imperative that the chosen tools would be able to create a productive, engaging, efficient and memorable gathering across multiple time zones—one that provided the energy and intimacy of an in-person convening. 
 
<blockquote>
<h3>&#8220;frog’s expertise in designing user-centered experiences and products was what we needed to help develop a strategy at the inception of a new partnership, and on top of that to do so amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We were looking for innovative and creative approaches to support our planning and felt that FROG could provide us with that.”  </h3>
– Joanna Lai, UNICEF NYHQ Adolescent Health Specialist  </blockquote>
 
Designing a new approach to virtual collaboration 
At the onset, we knew that we needed to co-create the event around the key focuses of enabling collaboration and elevating youth voices.  
Additionally, the UNICEF team came to us with three key design principles for the experience: 
<ul>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">Human-centered: We will retain and even improve upon the quality of outcomes expected from the original in-person conference design. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Uncompromising: We will prioritize human experiences and connections, and acknowledge that the work itself is centered around improving the lives of humans. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="1" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="3" data-aria-level="1">Inclusive: We will design so that all voices are heard, engagement is prioritized, and the best thinking of the group is captured in a way that is culturally appropriate across regions.  </li>
</ul>
This global event helped UNICEF, AZ YHP, their partners, and young people share, learn and strengthen relationships. By introducing Miro and Hopin, two new tools for remote workshops and conferencing, the teams were able to connect and collaborate, empowering them to continue pushing the boundaries of  young people’s health and well-being.  
The format of the event was carefully calibrated to consider how we could enable the widest audience to participate at any given time and simulate the best parts of an in-person conference. This meant: 
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<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="1" data-aria-level="1">Programming: In addition to live speakers, conversations and chats, the conference included asynchronous content like videos, polls and Miro boards that allowed participants to access the conversation on their time. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Virtual spaces: To accommodate side conversations and spontaneous interactions, we included unassigned rooms people could enter to talk to each other. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Networking experiences: Conference participants were paired up via video to connect, share and build their network. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">A space for breaks and fun: Meditation and dance rooms provided participants the opportunity to process, reenergize and refocus. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Music and visual cues: Just like an in-person conference, these cues signaled transitions and changes in tone and energy. </li>
<li data-leveltext="" data-font="Symbol" data-listid="2" aria-setsize="-1" data-aria-posinset="2" data-aria-level="1">Wayfinding: Virtual signage and human guides assisted people in getting from room to room. </li>
</ul>
In addition to designing the spaces and coordinating speakers, frog helped facilitate workshops for the country and regional teams, as well as for external partners and youth leaders.  
From the beginning, the UNICEF team knew the importance of elevating youth voices, so we actively designed ways to empower the Young Leaders by providing them ample stage time, outlets for collaboration, and dedicated time to craft and share their call to action to the group.

UNICEF

The remote conference had both live and asynchronous components, with high interaction during live sessions. 

3 DAYS 

We facilitated working session for UNICEF's Young Health Program partners. 

8 COMPANIES 

Attendees joined from multiple time zones, from Indonesia to Angola, the United Kingdom to Panama. 

15+ COUNTRIES 

The resulting 3-day virtual conference, made up of participants from more than 15 countries, marked the beginning of both a new partnership between UNICEF and AstraZeneca, and a powerful youth-led movement to prevent non-communicable diseases. It also proved that human-centered design can always provide solutions by helping to ask the right questions and understand where true value lies. For UNICEF, it was not just about recreating the event as it had always been, but understanding that the key to success is the ability to collaborate—whether we’re together in one room or connected across continents.

Fueling Healthcare Innovation through Venture Design

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“The Design Collaborative extends Pfizer Consumer Healthcare’s innovation capabilities by tapping into the creativity and design expertise at frog.”

Leveraging our corporate venture building capabilities, frog partnered with Pfizer Consumer Healthcare to rapidly develop new, scalable consumer healthcare businesses, well outside of their original core offering.

Beginning in March 2016, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (PCH) partnered with frog to establish the Design Collaborative, an innovation accelerator for the consumer health space. frog’s Venture Design principles, derived from many years of experience working as founders and with other entrepreneurs, guided the creation of the Design Collaborative. The joint initiative accelerated the development of new health solutions for consumers in the areas of sleep tracking and improvement, stress and energy management, nutrition and aging, among others. PCH and frog worked together to identify a range of opportunities within these target areas, select those most useful for empowering consumers to take health and wellness into their own hands, then structure both the offerings and business models around them.
The Design Collaborative was jointly staffed by frog and PCH, with key members co-located to ensure continuous engagement, strategic alignment and creative intensity. PCH team members rapidly adopted frog’s venture approach, favoring dynamic progress over rigid process, and leveraging customer insights to support accelerated decision making.
In nine months, the Design Collaborative delivered six new, refined and scalable business concepts that advanced Pfizer’s organizational goals and served as a beacon for innovation throughout the company.

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When frog and PCH partnered to launch The Design Collaborative, the team drew on frog’s Venture Design practice. First, they got to work identifying the target areas for innovation. They then tapped into design methodologies proven to achieve rapid, scalable business impact, leading to informed decisions about potential new opportunities.


A Venture Design Approach

The Design Collaborative used ‘experience simulation’ prototypes to validate opportunities with target customers. These empirical tests kept designers and developers tangibly immersed in the product experiences, and ensured customer needs stayed at the center of all decision making.

 Simulating Customer Experiences

After developing over 40 product & service concepts—each delivering new value in key consumer-focused areas—the Design Collaborative brought forward six new business opportunities to key stakeholders. Each was anchored in a large, unmet need, and presented with a clear business case for bringing to market. 

Making It Real

The Design Collaborative demonstrates the value of corporate venture building in enabling even the Fortune 50 to step beyond their prior boundaries and begin shifting their center of gravity to a next generation of core businesses.

DesignOps: Remote Collaboration


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Remote design capabilities are now essential. Learn the blueprint for remote design collaboration used by teams at frog, a global design consultancy, that supports creativity and impact when teams can’t be together.


As design teams have grown larger and travel constraints continue to change, distributed teams and remote collaboration are a new reality to which designers and their collaborators must adapt. This, of course, poses certain challenges, especially to creative teams that thrive on in-person interactions. DesignOps helps amplify creativity and impact at scale so design teams can do their best work, face-to-face, across town or a world away. When the situations arise that demand unexpected remote collaboration, efforts don’t have to grind to a halt. Teams that have a playbook for remote design collaboration experience less anxiety and stress, leading to better and more reliable design outcomes.

This 1-day intensive workshop is conducted remotely and focuses on setting up your design team for successful remote work and collaboration. Best for 5-10 participants.


1-Day Remote Intensive

Our 3-day deep dive is also conducted remotely. The 8-part session focuses on using DesignOps to successfully scale your design teams for peak efficacy and impact within your organization. Best for 5-10 participants.

3-Day Remote Deep Dive

We also offer custom workshops in which we create and tailor a curriculum that is highly specific to your needs. This can include deeper dives into one area that your team needs help in, supporting a larger group, or different breakout sessions by specific topics. For custom development, we work with you before and after the workshop to make sure all your specific needs are met.

Custom DesignOps Development

Through our DesignOps framework and workshops, we provide the best practices, tools and processes needed to foster design, creativity and collaboration across remote teams who are new to this way of work.

Supporting an Industrial Giant's Digital Transformation

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“We don’t make money on engines or drills — we make money on the services.”

frog worked with GE to plan, design and support their transformation into a digital company. Working with executive leadership, frog developed a vision for the software user experience and designed digital products for the core business, leading to a large-scale design system that increased the speed and efficiency of future design efforts.

frog worked to align teams around a new vision, creating the UX Center of Excellence (UX CoE). The UXCoE set broad guidelines for GE’s software design and development process, significantly decreasing time to market while improving user experiences. Clear process models, business cases and a UX playbook set the stage for a digital transformation.

Define the Vision

frog brought the vision to life with pilots, including an application for GE Aviation called myEngines. For GE Energy, frog redesigned the myFleet software, increasing operational efficiency at power plants. Pilots in other business units—from healthcare to transportation—built internal momentum for software and UX.

Demonstrate Results with Pilots

As different parts of the organization saw the impact of design, efforts expanded. frog helped GE establish the San Ramon Design Center and design the Industrial Internet Design Experience software system—an extensible UI toolkit and precursor to Predix—resulting in a 100% increase in productivity and $30 million in savings in the first year.

Design Gains Momentum

frog's collaborative design process brought GE together with their customer TransCanada to co-create a new product and secure an ongoing partnership. By leveraging co-creation practices, GE is able to dramatically increase speed to market for large scale industrial products.

Extending the Value of Design

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GE approached frog to support digital transformation efforts, define an overarching UX vision, and create a series of pilot projects for various business units.





2010-2012

The San Ramon Design Center opened and the Industrial Internet Design System (IIDS) launched, allowing GE to align design efforts across the organization.

2012-2014

frog supported the build out of a new design system in Predix—which was inspired by IIDS—and leveraged a design collaboration approach to help GE co-collaborate with partners.

2015

By establishing unified design standards and building a core foundation of tools, success metrics and governance models, GE has significantly reduced time to market and improved user experiences across all lines of business.

Middle-Out Strategy for Market Innovation

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“It’s easy for functional areas to develop silos in large organizations. By establishing the Collaboration Innovation Board, we were able to reach across those silos, determine common priorities, and combine resources to pursue truly breakthrough innovations. Not only did we get alignment on strategic direction, but we also accomplished things better and faster than each area could have on its own.”

A group of Hyundai leaders from the US region recognized that in order to innovate successfully for their market, they needed to work together across functions, businesses, and time horizons. With the help of frog, they created the Collaborative Innovation Board (CIB) to foster shared strategic efforts and launch pilots.



Challenging a Top-Down Strategy Hyundai’s organizational structure of distinct regional companies posed challenges in fostering communication and collaboration. After key leaders agreed that a shared perspective could expand the US market, they joined forces to engage frog in identifying strategies for collaboration. The resulting approach is designed to create and support change from the middle out, establishing a lasting framework that can evolve over time.
Overcoming the “Too Busy” Problem As a lean organization, Hyundai leadership is able to generate new ideas, but often lacks the bandwidth for implementation. frog worked with Hyundai to engage leaders in fully understanding distinct priorities and needs. We then created an “all-in” collaborative plan, including a tool kit for shared prioritization, decision making, and execution across different companies.
Pilots to Drive Adoption Over four months, frog worked with the CIB to select and fund pilot programs that would develop innovations across long-range design, mid-term engineering, and near-term sales and marketing functions. These pilots highlight to leadership how new ways of working, thinking and collaborating can ultimately have a positive impact on Hyundai’s bottom line.

frog and Hyundai took a lean, responsive approach to assessing needs and creating the Collaborative Innovation Board.



1 Month

North American leadership met regularly at frog-facilitated CIB sessions to align on vision, opportunities and budget to create multi-functional, cross discipline collaboration within the region.

12 Months

Three pilot programs are underway to explore the future of mobility across Hyundai design, engineering, and sales and marketing functions with the potential to go-to-market within one year.

3 Pilots

Redefining an Industry

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The American Dental Association (ADA) selected frog as a partner in transforming their business to better address rapidly evolving member needs. The result is an organization united in a new understanding of what dentists need from a professional association—and activated to launch a new business that is rapidly moving to market.

“We weren’t in a death spiral, but we needed to recognize that there’s a relevancy problem with the new generation of dentists. We needed a new way of thinking to address it.”


For more than 150 years, the ADA has been a leader serving the advocacy, community and professional development needs of its member dentists. Like many professional associations, the ADA’s services evolved at a time when most individual professionals worked independently, which meant they had few opportunities to connect and share experiences with their peers.
Today, while the need for advocacy remains strong, social media and a range of easily accessible tools offer dentists many alternative options for connection and community within the field. In parallel, new dental business models are changing how many dentists practice. This increased competition has caused the ADA, and the professional associations industry as a whole, to experience a decline in membership and overall revenue.
Aligning around Members 
To find a way forward, the ADA leadership sought a partner, frog, able to understand, and deliver value to, the new generation of dentists in the new realities of their professional experience. The partnership began with a deep-dive into the needs of both member and non-member dentists. Meanwhile, the team took a close look at the ADA, both on its greater business objectives and day-to-day realities.
Using a human-centered approach to transformation, frog helped the ADA see new opportunities and remove internal blockers to new service innovation. With Org Activation, frog’s approach to enabling sustainable innovation within an organization, the team was able to identify opportunities for growth and a path for implementation to make it real.
Building Agreement 
Throughout the engagement, a unique set of volunteer leaders and ADA staff worked hard to keep their organization engaged and open to selecting the most member-centered—and often riskiest—strategies. The team built buy-in across the entire organization by focusing time to involve and prepare stakeholders for a large, strategic change. By first aligning around what members value and what their motivations are, frog helped the ADA develop frameworks for making informed decisions around which risks made the most sense.
“There is real power in brevity,” said an ADA representative. “The idea that there are ‘Collectivist vs. Individualist’ dentists who see the value of a professional association differently was easy to explain, easy to understand and I’m 100 percent confident that we never would have gotten there by ourselves. It helped our leaders understand members in a new way and to buy into changing to support their needs.”
Since collaborating with frog, the ADA has funded a small team with a startup mandate to realize a new business offering designed to serve needs of dentists who might otherwise chose not to be members. One year in, the ADA has seen on-going alignment to the strategy across volunteer leaders and staff in all 50 states.
As an organization, the ADA now has a foundation for ongoing exploration of new ways to engage dentists, as well as a process for crafting new metrics and governance internally. They are now focused on growing their membership base with one important goal in mind: support the dental profession for the next 150 years.

frog and the ADA partnered to better understand members and to develop an innovation strategy centered on member loyalty.


17 Weeks

The team built buy-in across the entire organization by focusing time to involve and prepare stakeholders for a large, strategic change.

50 States

One new member-centered offering headed to market in 2019. MVP is now accepting applicants at www.ada.org/ada-practice-transitions

1 launch

Building the Future Workplace

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“We could not have done this project without frog. Because of their leadership, thoughtfulness and passion about how people work and collaborate we have been able to build this project. This Pilot gives us the opportunity to determine our future.”

Equinor asked frog to help them amplify creativity, increase collaboration and revolutionize how they work. Through a holistic approach, we designed an interdependent system of rituals and workflows, tools and space that support their cultural, social and business objectives. The Exploration Pilot is the first phase of a Master Plan to transform the culture and work environment across Equinor globally.

frog worked with the Equinor Executive Team and key stakeholders across the Exploration team to understand their challenges and aspirations. From here, we established the vision, key opportunity areas and behaviors that defined the Exploration Pilot.

 Evoking Behaviors

To determine the ideal work environment, frog designed an eco-system of behaviors, tools and spaces to be tested so that the Pilot teams could verify which components and configurations would become essential ingredients of their future work environment.

Designing the System

frog guided the construction and coordinated the integration of each component, including the specification and testing of collaborative platforms and digital interfaces. In partnership with the client, we led the orientation and coaching of each team to kick off their participation and work within the Pilot.

Building & Testing

Measuring the effectiveness of the mix of components and their impact on the business was critical to the success of the Pilot. These findings became the foundation of the Equinor Exploration Experience Language System & Master Plan, which is the backbone of Exploration facilities globally.

Scaling for the Future

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Project kick-off: frog completed an Experience & Workflow Audit, proposed Opportunity Areas and led the Executive Team Workshop to set the vision and establish the goals for the program.

6 Weeks

From research to conceptual design: An intensive design research effort exposed Key Insights which guided the conceptual direction of the project.

12 Weeks

From demolition to occupancy: The Exploration teams moved into the Pilot four months after construction began during which they went through a series of orientations to understand goals and to take ownership of their new work environment.

16 Weeks

The Exploration Pilot enables the Equinor staff to work in the ways they know best, break habits and rediscover the essence of geology.

Organization Design16

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