Circular Innovation Council (CIC)

A working proof of concept showing how CIC's three-stage membership model becomes a personalized digital experience — making member value visible, progression trackable, and engagement actionable.

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Inspiration

The Circular Innovation Council has a strong value proposition — but member interviews revealed a consistent gap: most members could not articulate what they were receiving from their membership. Not because the value was absent, but because nothing surfaced it to them in a meaningful way.

Our team identified this as the root cause of CIC's retention challenges. The problem was not the membership model itself, but the absence of a mechanism to make that model visible and actionable. This portal is our response to that finding.

What it does

The portal operationalises CIC's three-stage membership model — Exploration, Co-Creation, and Leadership — as a personalised digital experience for every member type.

Rather than a generic member page, each persona receives a dashboard calibrated to their stage. An early-stage startup sees orientation resources, a points bar tracking progress toward Co-Creation, and recommended actions tied to specific point values. The platform is unified; the experience is differentiated.

Key features:

  • Stage-aware dashboard — personalised stats, next steps, resources, and events driven by member role and stage
  • XP progression system — a transparent points bar and earnings table that removes ambiguity around how members advance
  • Membership Journey cards — the full value ladder across network, information, events, governance, and policy rendered as an in-portal reference
  • Community & Library — member announcements, a leaderboard, and a searchable, tier-filtered knowledge base
  • Admin view — a staff-facing dashboard for monitoring membership health and identifying at-risk accounts
  • Live persona switcher — demonstrates all four member experiences in real time without requiring a backend or authentication system

How we built it

The portal was built with HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. Persona state is managed through the browser's local storage. A single JavaScript file reads the active role and stage at page load and populates every section of the dashboard accordingly. Switching personas updates two stored values and reloads the page, producing a completely different experience with no server-side logic required.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge was translating a multi-dimensional strategic framework into a coherent user interface. CIC's value proposition spans across three membership stages, each of which needed to feel genuinely differentiated rather than superficially relabelled.

Equally challenging was maintaining discipline around scope. Every design decision was evaluated against a single criterion: does this make the strategic recommendation clearer? Features that did not meet that bar were cut.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The live persona switcher is the feature that best demonstrates the value of the prototype. Moving from an Exploration-stage startup to a Leadership-stage corporate member in real time — and seeing the dashboard transform entirely — communicates differentiated value more effectively than any static presentation could. It shifts the conversation from "trust the model" to "experience the model."

What we learned

Prototyping the portal forced a level of specificity that the strategy document did not require. Deciding exactly what that looks like on screen required answering questions the strategy had not yet resolved.

That process made both the product and the strategy more rigorous. The constraints of building something real are, in that sense, a useful diagnostic for the quality of the underlying thinking.

What's next for Circular Innovation Council (CIC)

The portal is one piece of a broader strategic recommendation to CIC.

At its core, the strategy asks CIC to reframe membership as a relationship that deepens over time — not a recurring fee. The three-stage model is the mechanism for that: Exploration builds the foundation, Co-Creation shifts members from consumers to contributors, and Leadership positions the most engaged members as co-owners of CIC's agenda. Each stage delivers meaningfully more value, and asks meaningfully more in return.

To sustain that model, CIC needs to invest in two things: making engagement visible to members in real time, and making member health visible to staff. The portal addresses both. But the harder work is cultural — helping CIC's team think about retention not as a renewal problem, but as an ongoing engagement problem that starts on day one.

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