Exploring service ecosystem and institutions of local craft brewing in Savannah, GA

How does mapping and developing a thorough understanding of the relationships between actors and institutions within a service ecosystem highlight or provide insights to innovation opportunities within that ecosystem? Our team wanted to investigate the way mapping ecosystems could help further our understanding of actors and institutions in an ecosystem and inform insights and highlight opportunities for innovation in local craft brewing in Savannah, GA.

Screen Shot 2019-01-23 at 9.58.52 PM.png

Screen+Shot+2019-01-23+at+10.00.35+PM.jpg

Ethnographic Research and Ecosystem Analysis

Craft breweries are often very active in the local community, and some of the barriers they face are due to structures, policies, and demands of much larger distribution networks that aim to serve the needs of beer corporations ultimately hurting the local craft brewers and their communities. After scoping problems that hinder local craft breweries from growing and sustaining their businesses, we investigated what kinds of institutions can be adjusted, revised, or created to innovate its ecosystem.

Defining Principles - aligning the different views and concerns

To establish our team’s perspective, first, we shared individual reflections and ideas regarding potential design principles. Then we set up a list of design principles together that we all agreed. Through this process, we could build and share our levels of understanding what direction this project should follow, and we were able to start shaping our solution roughly.

What is "local"?

Much of the secondary and primary research insights are connected to concepts about what it means for something to be considered “local.” The team was able to isolate the common themes of Labor (who makes the beer), Sourcing (what and where ingredients and inputs come from), and Production how it is produced to clear our internal definition of “local".” We then mapped our concepts from our brainstorm to see how the ideas were correlated to these areas.

Approach : Institutional Framework

In order to successfully influence institutional rearrangements, we broke down institutionalized rules and social norms by this framework; breaking, making, and maintaining. This gave us an idea that what could transform the current ecosystem structure into a preferred one overtime. By coupling these new institutions with existing ones the system is much more likely to adopt it organically.

Proposed Solutions on Ecosystem Levels

As is

To be

As is

To be

Understanding Value Flows

The value models offered an abstraction that is useful in exploring new business networks and their properties, and in understanding the risks that are crucial in cross-organizational business process design.

Idea

Incorporate local culture in beers
Create a formal coalition between local businesses, suppliers and partners

Solution - Models of Cooperatives

Create a “collective organization” which supports and facilitates the creation of local craft beer within the categories of Sourcing, Labor and Production that adhere to our design principles.

Hypothesis

The amount of time it takes to create institutional change is unknown, we believe multiple actor buy in towards a common goal is a path towards institutional transition.

Conclusions

Today’s craft brewery systems, structures and institutions are not permanent entities that exist outside of our imagination. Rather, they are the sum of multiple human interventions, designs and adaptations made over a longtime period. This project suggests this can be done through innovating on the current institutions and social structures that make up the ecosystem but build a co-op maintained and funded by the local breweries and businesses involved.

Craft brewing in Savannah