Our Virtual Innovation Trip to Germany

We embarked on the challenge of creating a virtual innovation trip from our exploration enthusiasm but soon realized the difficulty of finding collaborations with institutions and companies in the midst of the pandemic and quarantine, most of them teleworking, part-time or directly closed. Never the less, we assumed the challenge!

The central topic for the trip was divided into two, on the one hand, virtual visits and telepresence, and on the other, as in all innovation trips that we interact and understand the German mindset regarding innovation and its standards and the cultural specificities of its way of thinking. The sessions were held all afternoons from 17:00 - 21:00 with virtual coffee breaks and session changes, company, and city

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We started the first day with our tour and full program on Google Earth to visit GIZ the German International Cooperation Agency in Berlin who welcomed us to the country and explained to us about their work around the world. From the GIZ office in La Paz, Bolivia which explained projects in that country and their cultural dialogue with Latin America. Later, via Google Earth, we went to Stuttgart where Marca Gráfica showed us their new virtual stand for fairs and told us about how they deal with German and international clients.

To complete our first day we had Ralf Goldkind Famous German singer and music producer from Lucilectric, as a special guest, who talked about German culture and his experiences as a German in Catalonia.

On Tuesday we made a virtual visit to the Steelcase Learning Innovation Center in Munich, from which his team took us on a tour of the showroom and posed the challenge of virtual visits and tells us how Steelcase has integrated Design Thinking into its innovation process and projects with companies. The challenge is set and our teams must also work to generate innovation proposals for the Virtual Stand and the LIC of Steelcase.

On Wednesday we return to Stuttgart where professors from the Hochschule Pfortzheim and the Hochschule Reutlingen meet with us for group dynamics and give feedback to each of our teams on the development of their projects and their German perspective on each of the projects similar in Germany, and how they could improve them according to their point of view. That same day we traveled via Google Earth to Munich for the first part of the Workshop in Speculative Design that OuiShare offers us from its offices. At Zoom Breakout Rooms and using shared files our teams manage to develop future scenarios for their projects. An amazing and fun session, dreaming about futures but based on today´s trends.

On Thursday we headed to Berlin where our colleagues from Dark Horse Innovation gave feedback to our teams on their projects, bringing new ideas and a very German perspective to their proposals. With this feedback, we return to Munich for the second part of the Speculative Design workshop with Ouishare and the final and futuristic ideas with feedback from invited network members from different parts of the world.

Friday is the great day for presenting ideas and proposals for innovation on our virtual visit challenges. The Steelcase team and the Marca Gráfica Team would carefully jury our team's presentations, asking questions, and developing their proposals. Each team presented evolution solutions for the current virtual visit formats and delivered a document with ideas and inspiration for both companies.

Our trip is over and we return to Barcelona to spend the weekend at home. During the trip, multiple platforms and many digital tools were used, telepresence technologies such as video transmission, and virtual exhibitions that provided inspiration and context to the teams for their projects and their professional lives were explored.