We delivered an international ethnography with European Jobseekers. Our client is determined to change the careers industry with new online services. We had the chance to closely collaborate with one of their most outstanding teams exploring the job seeking journey in two European countries. Field interviews with 24 job seekers, profile writing, pattern recognition delivered strategic insights how to approach the new markets. We synthesized several relevant issues such as self-management and building up momentum, trading-off ideals against immediate benefits, projecting a big picture strategy and learning to apply different media, and need for tactical support (writing CVs, cover letters and improving interview skills). We are looking forward to continue our cooperation in the new year.

Within a new project, we help a new client of ours to understand jobseekers' challenges and views across the whole application process (from looking for potential employers, to creating a CV and cover letter, to interviewing) in different European countries. Our client is an online business that helps people to successfully find, apply and interview for jobs. From our empirical insights, we will derive recommendations to improve the customer experience and expanding our product offering of our client.

We have successfully completed an ethnographic research and customer journey project for TUEV NORD Mobility. Together with representatives from our client, we created 3 future state journeys, came up with 10 new concepts, 56 ideas and a lot of newly discovered or reformulated challenges for digitization and organizational development. Adding on to the promised results we also delivered two executive posters, one summing up the key insights and the other one providing an overview of the current customer journey and three future state journeys for different personas. We thank our client representatives for the excellent cooperation!

As partner of IZT we are part of the European Horizon 2020 project 5G-Victori, providing ubiquitous super-fast, reliable connectivity and seamless service delivery. The project focussed on large scale trials of next generation of communication networks and services for advanced use cases in Transportation, Energy, Media, and Factories of the Future. We contribute sustainable business models and the values-based innovation approach to generate alternative business models for each vertical use case. Each should be aligned with the SDGs, ist impact should be measurable following the DECD (2018) standard to link SDGs and targets to impact models and indicators. For more information check the project website. There you will also learn what victori stands for: VertIcaldemos over Common large scale field Trials fOrRail, energy and media Industries.

We are conducting an adapted, 4-day format of the Design Sprint for TÜV Nord Mobility, a German but worldwide active technical service provider.

For one of the major German providers of technical services and testing, we review the customer journey of its most important business customers. A combination of journey mapping, ethnographic field research in car dealerships and workshops, and co-creation will provide the insights and a baseline to create the future state journey. Together we are also setting new priorities for upcoming digitization projects, marketing efforts and strategy.

In cooperation with colleagues from QM-Beratung Berlin we have conducted a workshop with the leaders of the RPG group to clarify its values and strategy. "Surprising, which values we already share" and "the day helped us to strengthen our cooperation" were two of the consistently positive comments from our customers. In a next step, a reformulation of mission and vision and the modeling of the individual business units are planned.

We started a series of co-creation workshops with stakeholders of a new client from om the automotive industry. Potential customers contribute to designing an online shop based on rapid paper prototyping and card sorting exercises. Retailers are invited to participate in the co-creation of new business models that are attractive for themselves, for customers and the manufacturer. Bringing different parties together, and facilitating their interaction we co-produce a mutually valued outcome. A major result in this case will be the design concepts for an online shop suited to different target groups.

How can Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV) become a mainstream building component? What are the motivating values behind such a development, and what business models should be pursued to support these values? We are working for an international group of reseachers and practitioners of the International Energy Agency in Uppsala, Sweden. We captured directive values in European BIPV business to develop new business models for making BIPV a mainstream building component. Based on an initial collection and discussion of values 18 new business ideas have been identified. Two of these ideas were elaborated upon using the Business Innovation Kit, named Power2Consumers and Photovoltaic Catalogue. Two groups worked to sketch viable business models for each ideas and described five business models in more detail. Thanks and regards to a highly engaged group of participants! Image: Frodeparken building with BIPV facade in Uppsala

We finished an international field study in Italy, France and Spain for a large automotive client. Gathering speech data in real driving situations, audio editing and annotating utterances from drivers our international team contributes to the development of next generation speech recognition and infotainment systems. The project adds on to valuable results from a speech recognition study in Germany we conducted earlier this year.