The German branch of a renowned American pharmaceutical company wants to empower each individual employee to participate even more actively in an innovation culture. “Empowerment” is the key word. Will the principles of the Design Thinking method give the team new energy and ideas? After intensive consideration of the topic, the management decides to give it a try. The annual team meeting becomes the focal point for the first encounter with the innovation method.

In advance, corecreate conducts a team lead training with 20 employees, preparing them to guide their colleagues through the Design Thinking process at the meeting. “How can we improve our collaboration – with regard to our new mission statement?” This question is to be thoroughly explored. “Not so easy!”, the participants realize. The human-centered approach of the method demands quite a bit of perspective-shifting from the participants. Especially finding the right questions proves to be tricky during the mutual interviews. But at the end of the day, everyone is confident they can successfully perform their job as team lead.

“Grow Your Ideas!” is the theme of the meeting, which brings together about 170 employees. “How can we improve our collaboration and which aspect is so important to us that we would build a chair for it?” With this task, the teams get to work. Complex prototypes for chairs that take a stand are created. More support, communication with each other, and space for a functioning error culture are needs that almost every chair expresses. A target invites people to sit – goal orientation but with a feel-good factor!

During the presentation of the chairs, everyone, and especially the management, gains important insights for future collaboration. There is agreement that Design Thinking will play a role in the company in the future. How exactly remains to be explored.