Public sector organizations struggle to address today’s complex challenges through traditional institutional structures. Innovation labs have emerged as an organizational response, yet their potential depends on the organization cultural and the quality of the infrastructure connecting the stakeholders and processes. This thesis is situated at the intersection of systemic design, service ecosystem design, and public sector innovation, and examines how design practice can strengthen the process infrastructure of a newly established e-health innovation lab. 

The Innovation Environment (IE) is a collaborative innovation lab between Region Kalmar Län and Linnaeus University, set up to develop need-driven digital health solutions at the intersection of public healthcare, academia, and private technology partners. Despite its clear mission and committed actors, the IE lacks the shared structures that allow clinical needs to travel reliably from the healthcare floor to technical development. This thesis asks: what structural gaps exist in the IE's current process, and how can systemic design strengthen its infrastructure to support need-driven collaboration between clinical and technical actors? 

Research through Design guided the methodology for this project. Data was gathered through twelve semi-structured interviews, three field visits, desk research, visual system mapping, and benchmarking of comparable frameworks. Three facilitated workshops translated findings into a validated design direction. 

The result is the Kalmar Innovation Oak, a conceptual ecosystem framework that maps the IE's innovation process onto the architecture of a living oak tree. The framework provides a shared language across the IE's fragmented actor groups, formalizes existing regional practices and introduces three operational canvases to guide actors through need-finding, operationalization, and co-creation. The first and foundational Canvas was co-created and validated with IE actors in the final workshop. 

The study concludes that addressing the structural conditions and processes of innovation is a form of innovation in and of itself, as it impacts how actors view the system, understand their roles, and relate to one another, with long-term implications for the quality of health services in the Kalmar region.