Channel your Creativity. Develop a Business Concept in Three Days

The workshop gives aspiring entrepreneurs tangible tools and creative confidence to develop their own business ideas. The coaches, co-founders of Dark Horse Innovation, show participants how to use their talents to create inspiring products and services.

The aim of the workshop is to bring aspiring entrepreneurs from "zero to hero". It helps participants to direct their creativity to create inspiring products and services. The workshop gives attendees tangible tools and the creative confidence to develop their own business ideas from general trends, user needs and their creative talent.

The workshop shows how creative thinking and a design-led approach can - and should - be the basis for entrepreneurship in addition to the more traditional business and technology-focused perspectives. The lively Berlin start-up scene provides a number of interesting examples for that. In the workshop, co-founders of the Berlin-based agency Dark Horse Innovation, build on their own experiences in founding their highly unusually structured company and the expertise they developed through working with diverse clients.

The workshop supports creatives to channel their ideas and inspirations into tangible business concepts. It helps participants to use their artistic talent to develop product and service solutions that cater to the needs of "ordinary people“.

Methods

• Deep-dive and reframing a challenge: Look beyond the surface to uncover hidden opportunities
• Qualitative user research and empathy as an innovation tool: Interview and observe people to discover latent needs
• Frameworks to derive insights and personas from research: Analyze and synthesize your field work to direct your creativity
• Group-based ideation techniques: Build on each other to develop extraordinary ideas
• Prototyping as a tool to understand and test ideas: Visualize and build ideas to quickly learn what works
• Iteration and experiments as business strategy: Learn to love constant change
• Team building and collaboration tools: Make interdisciplinary teamwork fun and productive

Participants

The workshop bridges the gap between societal trends and creative individuals on the one hand and successful product and service offerings on the other hand. The workshop is for freelancers, creatives, not-yet-creatives, young and established talents and corporate rebels, who want to turn their passion into products, generate income from their inspirations and team up with other thinkers and doers. Requirements to participate include curiosity, creative energy and cross-disciplinary cooperation. Participants don't need to bring spreadsheet skills or start-up ideas - we will develop creative business models during the workshop. The workshop is not aimed at people who already have a clear idea in mind and now need legal, financial and organizational support to implement it. It aims to inspire, motivate and connect individuals who are looking for a way to unite creativity and business.

Coaches

The coaches are co-founders of Dark Horse Innovation. The Berlin-based agency develops user-centered services and products and helps clients to build and maintain a collaborative, innovation-friendly working culture. To be innovative, you have to do something differently - this truism is the basis of Dark Horse, where 30 young co-founders from 25 disciplines work together without any hierarchies whatsoever. Since 2009, Dark Horse has worked with corporate clients like SAP, Audi and Deutsche Bahn and established strong links to the Berlin start-up scene. In 2014, Dark Horse published a book „Thank God it’s Monday“ (in German) about the digital transformation and its impact on the present and future of work.