Value Network Analysis from the Workshop Series
Living Labs bring together complex groups of stakeholders to co-create solutions to difficult challenges. In the first stage of our project, NOVELL brought together stroke survivors, designers and architects, and healthcare professionals to explore four key themes associated with rehabilitation environments.
As anyone who has taken part in any good collaborative process would know, when you collaborate with people, it’s as much about the incidental conversations, little insights, networks, and strong working relationships and/or friendships that are formed as it is about the tangible outcomes. One of the difficulties that has traditionally been faced in documenting and accounting for collaboration is that it is difficult to capture the value that is being generated through traditional mechanisms.
To address this, our Facilitation Manager, Dr Aaron Davis, conducted a Value Network Analysis at the end of the workshop series. Value Network Analysis is a process that allows us to capture the intangible value that is exchanged between participants. This might sound a bit complex, but the easiest way to think about intangible value is to think about the kinds of things you get from participating in a collaborative process that you can’t necessarily put a price on - like feeling good because your expertise is being appreciated, or enjoying hearing the perspectives of others.
The Value Network Analysis process is part of our ongoing evaluation of the project and the living lab process that underpins it. It allows us to identify where the living lab is doing well in delivering value to stakeholders, and where we might need to work harder.
Each participant co-created an individual Value Network Map with Aaron through a semi-structured interview. These value maps explored the two-way exchanges between each participant and the other stakeholder groups, as well as with ‘the project’ as a whole. This means we explored what each participant felt they had received from the project and other stakeholders, as well as what they felt they had contributed. Individual results were then combined according to the four stakeholder groups: stroke survivors, healthcare professionals, designers/architects, and facilitators.
Image: Relationships between stakeholder groups explored through the Value Network Analysis process
The analysis has described a lot of different kinds of value that were being generated and exchanged during the workshop processes and has been documented in a rather hefty report. But, to summarise some of the key points for you:
One of the most significant exchanges of value that was described was the general increase in understanding across disciplines, something that we often ‘know’ is of value, but now have data to prove.
The VNA showed that running the workshops online rather than face-to-face generated some interesting value for participants, with some reflecting that they found it easier to participate in this way than in face-to-face workshops. However, it also showed that there are elements of the face-to-face experience that are hard to replicate in a digital environment, including the ever important ‘chat over a cup of tea’.
One of the more surprising results of the VNA was that there often was an underestimation of the value people thought they provided, compared to the value that other stakeholder groups reported receiving. Our stroke survivor participants contributed a tremendous amount of value to other participants just by sharing their experiences and ideas, but stroke survivors didn’t always recognise how valuable this was for other participants.
For future workshops, and for other practitioners who work in this space, an important finding was that participants found it more challenging to engage with abstract concepts than they would have in a face-to-face environment.
We also found that our stroke survivor participants and our healthcare professional participants often defaulted to a consumer feedback model of engagement rather than the more open-ended co-creation processes we were trying to facilitate. We are now looking at ways of helping these stakeholders to step outside of these traditional roles to engage in the next stage of the project in a less constricted way.
Overall, the Value Network Analysis has shown that participants across all stakeholder groups received significant value from participating in the project. It was exciting to also find out that people “enjoyed the process”, “had fun”, and “felt hopeful about the future”. The documentation of this feedback through the Value Network Analysis helps confirm that we are on the right track, and provides us with a really useful baseline to refer back to as we continue to roll out the NOVELL Redesign project.
If you are interested in learning more about the Value Network Analysis process, or accessing more detail about the findings, please get in touch with our team at novellredesign@florey.edu.au or through the contact us page of our website.