Redesigning an Equitable NASA Service Experience for Small Businesses

The NASA SBIR/STTR service has struggled, only serving a homogenous group of small businesses, mostly owned by white men, and serving mostly predominantly white institutions perpetuating the same inequities that founded the United States. Additionally, the NASA SBIR/STTR has provided low technology transition rates for the small businesses and research institutions it serves. Our challenge is to redesign the service as a robust pipeline of increasingly diverse small businesses, especially women-owned, veteran-owned, and minority-owned small businesses, and research groups, especially minority serving institutions and women’s colleges, who easily enter the marketplace and experience improved transition rates.

We created an intermediate design brief as a first step: design a service that collects sufficient data, measures CX, and forms strong partnerships to improve technology transition rates using SBIR/STTR resources in alignment with NASA priorities/policy. We built participatory ResearchOps/DesignOps programs and conducted landscape assessments of CX, EX, and service health using 9 streams of research and triangulations. We built CX/EX journey/experience maps, service blueprints, VoC/VoE programs and biannual publications with Service Insights reports. We created a service dashboard, experimentation board, and a service roadmap of design changes and experiments from the current to the near-and-long-term future states.

By building a platform that continually measures equity and CX/EX, NASA now knows its goal progress and is consistently improving towards equitable outcomes. We also raised helpdesk CX/EX CSAT to 4.8/5.0, service uptime to 100%, reduced proposal submission errors to 1%, doubled program awareness among underrepresented groups, and halved Phase 1 evaluation times. Internally, we cultivated an experimentation culture, built trimesterly learning programs, started ongoing book clubs, moved to outcome-based performance plans, improved portfolio selection EX to 9.1/10, infused equity into our CX/EX/SI equations, built an innovation platform with decision-making CX/EX/SI dashboards, created our first program strategy, and more.

We practiced Participatory Design, gathering employees to donate 40% of their time to form a participatory employee team. We formed a customer participatory team. Customers and employees designed their own experiences. We diversified the team hiring 13-20 student interns each trimester. We conducted 9 different streams of research, using triangulation to build confidence if insights were confirmed in multiple streams. We moved all software to open source, reducing our costs and saving taxpayer money. We used planet-centered design to reduce the ecological footprint of our software. We broke down our service design into CX, EX, and Service Health, measured through the Service Index (SI). We collaboratively built equations for CX, EX, and SI and infused equity into each, ultimately measuring equitable CX, EX, and Si. We mixed HCD and Futures methodologies, creating designs for both near-term and long-term future state services. We built roadmaps leading from today to the near-term and then long-term future state services. Internally, we built a learning agenda, switched to outcome-based performance plans, and designed ourselves to be a service organization aligning on the ultimate customer, conducting service audits to see what parts of our jobs contribute to CX and cutting away the extraneous parts.