Creating Collaborative Digital Spaces


Alliance Bioversity & CIAT STRATEGIC Objectives:

  1. People consume diverse, nutritious and safe foods

  2. People participate in and benefit from inclusive, innovative and diversified agri-food markets

  3. People sustainably manage farms, forests and landscapes that are productive and resilient to climate change

  4. Communities and institutions sustainably use and safeguard agricultural biodiversity


SCIENCE WEEK OBJECTIVES

The three main objectives were to:

  1. Share knowledge across the institution, build social capital across teams, and give new faces the opportunity to interact with science leaders.

  2. Reflect on how we have done in exploring new areas from the strategy and consider lessons learned.

  3. Look forward and identify new areas that we might explore in the next three years.


The Process

CreateConsulting designed five interactive SCIENCE AT THE EDGE virtual boards using Mural, a digital collaboration tool that enables team members to connect, collaborate and brainstorm in real-time.

The murals included:

  • a Guest testing space

  • a Journey map for a visual overview of the week

  • an Appreciate board displaying important scientific achievements

  • a Disrupt board featuring 12 hot topics and

  • a Discover board reflecting innovative contributions.

These murals had four objectives: to map all work across the organisation, to see who is doing what so that people could reach out to individuals, to provide a summary at the end of every day and to pull sense-making themes from the week’s content.


A successful journey

The outcome was impressive, with 12 cross-cutting emerging hot topics, 6 external speakers, 43 innovations presented and 15 Open Space sessions held. More than 250 researchers of 33 nationalities, were able to share thoughts, innovations, and experiences about their science.


Arwen Bailey, Knowledge Sharing and Science Communication Specialist was thrilled with the outcomes:

"It's amazing that you (the Create team) can be so flexible and adapt as the process emerges. I appreciated the attention to detail, colours, look and feel, illustrations, deep listening and how you put it all into action. I am happy with how it turned out."

Justin Kiley