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Case Study

How 3 Employees and 30 Partners Transformed 52,000 Vaccination Stations

April 16, 20268 min read

In our previous case study, a Haier employee coordinated partners to launch a $600K consumer product. That story started with an idea. This one started with a fridge door that wouldn't close.

What followed is one of the clearest examples of how a small team can redesign an entire industry — not by building more, but by coordinating partners who each bring one piece of the solution.

The Problem: A Fridge Door That Never Closed

Gong Yi was the R&D Director of a Haier micro-enterprise that manufactured vaccine storage cabinets — the refrigerators used in China's 52,000 vaccination stations, where 100 million children are inoculated each year against childhood diseases.

Gong Yi was also a father of two young children. On one visit to a vaccination station, he watched the staff work and noticed something obvious: the single door on the vaccine fridge — the very fridge his team had built — was never closed. With hundreds of patients moving through each day, staff were constantly reaching in and out. There was no way the vaccines were being kept at the correct temperature.

The person who made the product saw the product failing in real conditions.

Starting Small: 3 People and a Proposal

Gong Yi recruited two colleagues and petitioned Haier's biomedical platform — the organizational layer that hosted their existing vaccine cabinet micro-enterprise — for permission to launch an entirely new micro-enterprise with a different approach.

The initial idea was narrow: replace the single-door fridge with an eight-door design. When any one door was open, only 12.5% of the vaccines would be exposed to temperature variation instead of 100%.

Haier approved the proposal, which meant two micro-enterprises now operated in parallel — one selling the original single-door cabinet, one selling the eight-door version. The platform let the market decide which was better.

This is a detail worth pausing on. In most organizations, proposing a product that competes with your own team's product would be career-ending. In Haier's model, it took three people and a simple proposal to get started.

The Vision Expanded: From a Fridge Door to an Entire Experience

Once Gong Yi and his colleagues were operating as their own micro-enterprise, their perspective shifted. The fridge was one problem. The entire vaccination station experience was the real problem:

  • Appointments: Parents arrived early and queued in unruly crowds. There was no reservation system.
  • Registration: Check-in and prescription registration were manual, slow, and paper-based.
  • The vaccination itself: Staff administered up to 300 inoculations per day at poorly designed workstations. Injections only happened in the morning — the rest of the day was consumed by paperwork and inventory management.
  • The observation period: After inoculation, children were required to wait 30 minutes in drab, unwelcoming facilities.

Gong Yi decided to offer turn-key renovations of the entire vaccination experience. The fridge was just the entry point.

Building the Ecosystem: 30 Partner Categories in Months

A three-person micro-enterprise cannot redesign a national healthcare experience alone. Gong Yi needed capabilities across domains his team had never touched. Within months, the micro-enterprise had assembled 30 different categories of ecosystem partners:

  • A Haier software micro-enterprise built a WeChat app for appointment booking — eliminating the queuing problem entirely
  • Another software micro-enterprise designed a WeChat-based registration system for physician prescriptions and check-in
  • External carpenters designed and built custom ergonomic workstations for staff administering 300+ daily inoculations
  • A Haier supply chain micro-enterprise with hospital logistics experience handled cold-chain monitoring from factory to station
  • Interior design partners renovated the 30-minute observation areas with colorful local cultural themes, toys, and safe furniture
  • Entertainment partners provided smart-phone-operated rocking horses and other play equipment for the waiting areas

Each partner joined voluntarily because the opportunity was clear. And each earned revenue from the integrated offering.

The rocking horse is a small but telling detail: it generates per-ride revenue that is shared between the vaccination station, the rocking horse provider, and Haier. Revenue sharing extended all the way to the waiting room.

The Results: An Industry Redesigned

The integrated Smart Vaccine offering transformed how vaccination stations operated across China:

  • Appointments replaced queuing — parents booked from home via smartphone
  • Vaccinations ran all day instead of only mornings, because paperwork was automated
  • The new eight-door cabinet held 700 boxes of vaccine with proper temperature control
  • The entire cold chain was monitored from factory to station in real time
  • Observation areas became welcoming spaces that generated their own revenue streams

Haier continued selling the original single-door cabinet through the original micro-enterprise. As Gong Yi put it: "We are not really competing against each other. This is more like iPhone 5 vs. iPhone 10."

The original micro-enterprise sold a fridge. The new one sold a complete, integrated experience — and opened up revenue opportunities for every partner in the ecosystem.

Why Coordination Was the Product

The Smart Vaccine story contains every element of what makes multi-party coordination work:

  1. It started with a real problem observed firsthand — not a market analysis or a strategy document, but a father watching a fridge door that wouldn't close.
  2. The barrier to starting was low — three people and a proposal. No committee approvals, no budget requests, no 18-month planning cycles.
  3. The vision expanded once the team was in motion. They started with a fridge door and ended up redesigning a national healthcare experience. That expansion happened because they were close to the problem, not because someone planned it from above.
  4. Partners brought capabilities the core team didn't have. Carpenters, software developers, entertainment providers, supply chain specialists — none of these would have been hired by a fridge company. But all of them were essential to the final offering.
  5. Revenue sharing aligned everyone. Each partner earned from the integrated offering. No one needed to be managed or motivated. Financial alignment replaced management oversight.

The result was an offering no single company could have built — assembled in months, not years, by a team that started with three people and a proposal.

The Pattern That Transfers

Gong Yi had Haier's internal platform to find partners, form the ecosystem, and automate revenue distribution. That platform made coordination operationally viable instead of administratively impossible.

The pattern itself — complementary partners bundling their capabilities into one integrated offering and sharing the revenue — works at any scale. Three startups combining their products into a single package for a specific market. An agency partnering with a tech provider and a designer to deliver a complete solution. A SaaS company bundling with an implementation partner and a content team.

The constraint is never the idea. It's the coordination infrastructure — contracts, revenue tracking, partner discovery, and automated payouts. Without it, multi-party collaboration collapses under its own administrative weight. With it, three people and a proposal can redesign an industry.

This case study is based on research by Bill Fischer, published in the Business Ecosystem Alliance.

Ordana provides the coordination infrastructure for projects outside corporate ecosystems — partner discovery, shared contracts, and automated revenue splitting. The same mechanics that let Gong Yi's three-person team assemble 30 partner categories and transform an industry.

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