Looking back to the workshop led by Prof. Christen Jakob at Forum ö 2016: Innovation meets Tradition on June 2nd 2016 in Zurich…
The focus of the workshop was on Corporate Impact Venturing, a form of Design Thinking. A starting point in this concept of internal innovation development is the problem definition (challenge), which aims a social impact and sustainable solution. The sustainability aspect is crucial, starting point in the process and a stimulus for innovation development. The participants in the workshop had to present topics from their daily worklife and afterwads in a brainstorming session come up with problem-solving ideas. Thereafter, the ideas were clustered and a prototype was created. The latter was subsequently tested and optimized in real-time situation with the aim to finally solve the original problem.
The interactive workshop led in all groups to concrete practical solutions and showed that even in a short time and a spontaneous setting a good approach to a specific challenge can be found. This could be particularly interesting for small and medium enterprises where there is a lack of financial ressources for big CSR projects. Generally it is important that sheer norms and regulations of the potential social and environmental innovation development are not left unconsidered – at all levels of the design process and of course at the product and service scope.