Managinginnovationatscale

Overview

Onova's innovation programs relied on third-party platforms that were too disconnected — hindering both organiser workflows and participant experience.

Onova is an innovation consultancy that runs internal innovation programs for major enterprise clients — including Capgemini, BMO, and McDonald's. But behind each engagement was a fragmented operations process. The event-organising team had to piece together multiple third-party platforms to deliver on event requirements.

Solution

Relay: A unified platform for running enterprise innovation programs.

Relay gives Onova a unified platform to run large-scale enterprise innovation programs. It supports the full program lifecycle — from registration and team formation to project submission and judging.

A look at Relay's key workflows

Outcomes

Serving companies like...

Initial Findings

Fragmented platforms created a confusing experience for both organisers and participants.

Working with stakeholders, I used past survey data to identify the key pain points across the event journey. These insights helped me define the product direction and decide which problems to prioritise.

Design System

We built a design system to support rapid product development.

The existing system wasn't built for scale. I worked with the team to define the brand keywords, translate them into a moodboard, and set the visual direction. Two key considerations guided our brainstorming:

From there, we built a simple design system to streamline core product development and ensure consistency across the platform.

Live Dashboard

Participants need a central hub for the full innovation program experience.

Participants struggled to navigate sites and find information across innovation programs. We designed a centralised system that brought everything related to each event into one place. The process started with an audit of the previous design, followed by layout explorations with the internal team, focusing on core features, space usage, and information hierarchy.

Fixing the scroll challenge!

The design challenge was to surface the most important content first, while preserving the familiar navigation patterns users relied on to find what they needed.

Our solution was a simple expand-and-collapse toggle, allowing users to hide the important but less frequently used header and access the information they needed more easily.

Beta Launch & Testing

We launched Relay at a student innovation program.

During the program, we tested the platform with real participants through user interviews. Their feedback informed Relay's next development cycle and helped prioritise the most important improvements.

Iterating with Insights

Key finding: Users were missing the live dashboard.

User interviews and Google Analytics revealed two usability issues: low discovery of the "Live Now" dashboard, and unclear labelling for the "Team & Submission" page.

There was significant room to improve Relay's information architecture. We focused on making navigation clearer for users while supporting the client's need for both private and public content pages.

After restructuring the information architecture, renaming key pages, and refining the navigation, significantly more students discovered the live dashboard in a later round of the program.

The Showcase

We showcased Relay at a Capgemini x Google Cloud innovation program.

The showcase put Relay in front of Capgemini and Google Cloud's partnered innovation program, with a projected reach of over 1,000 employees across both companies.

With Relay, we delivered a successful showcase that met our client's goals for the event:

This showcase marked a turning point — it demonstrated Relay's potential to a major enterprise audience, with a clear path to recurring engagements and continued product investment.

Reflection

What I learned