hot housing collaboration at WHU Düsseldorf

A commute with wings, flying from London City Airport to Düsseldorf

Where: WHU Campus Düsseldorf

What: Future Leaders Fundraising Challenge

Assignment: How to work creatively in teams

The first week of term for students of WHU’s post grad degree is a fast-track in team building, creative thinking and innovation. The annual Future Leaders Fundraising Challenge sees the students split into teams and take on the task of creating a product that will raise money for the University’s chosen charity (this year it’s Save the Children).

Tutors curate a roster of experts in different fields to give talks, share their knowledge, feedback on the ideas and encourage more innovation. For this week’s challenge, I got to join the roster of experts and give a talk on building creativity in teams. The talk was designed to motivate and share some ideas to help these relative strangers connect with each other, generate ideas quickly, give each other feedback, and manage energy levels during what was likely to be an intense week.

Giving the talk was fun – I had a mic, we did ‘pass the move’ to raise the energy and laughter levels in the room, and came up with a bus-load of ideas to reduce traffic on the roads of Düsseldorf in just 2 minutes. What was equally enjoyable was getting to be part of a Pop Idol style panel for the presentation session at the end of the day, when all the teams made the first presentation of their early stage ideas.

My takeaway: when it comes to innovating, done really is better than perfect!

Thanks for having me WHU! Good luck to all the students for the rest of the year. The standard of ideas was ridiculously good. I can’t wait to see how much they finally raise for Save the Children.