Example:  MixTup & Bloc23
Where:      Amsterdam Hospitality Branch & Creative Sector
Aim:           Strategic Engagement of Stakeholders around a business idea
Action:       Interactive Workshop with Stakeholders and Illustrated Ideas
How to take the hospitality branch to the next level? Where does the creative industry meet bars, restaurants and clubs? The Challenge is that innovating a branch demands to come up with a yet unknown business model. To find the niche between “what is” and “what is desired” a solid research is needed. In order to get to creative and new ideas, you need to ask a focus group the right type of questions. This is exactly what a team consisting of MixTup (a creative incubator) and Bloc23 (an art bar) realized. And then they thought of us, knowing that we ‘can do cool stuff with groups’. They also knew we know how to ask questions to trigger creative thinking. We summarize it as offline crowd-sourcing. (Read more about session designs for successful crowdsourcing).
The Action we took consisted of five steps:
(1) Alignment of the core team on their goals for both the project and the multi-stakeholder meeting,
(2) Creation of a visual template that would help us structure the data generated by the people invited,
(3) Selection of a group of highly inspiring and relevant people in the branch to invite for the event,
(4) Design and visualization of the interactive event program,
(5) Hosting and moderation of the event with ‘live’ capture of the ideas and concepts shared by the participants.
See in the presentation below a summary of step 5.
Or read about the previous steps here (with MixTup) and here (with Erasmus MC).
The Result of the evening was a big visual poster illustrating the gap between today’s reality and where the industry wants to grow towards. Key partnerships between MixTup/Bloc23 and stakeholders were formed at the event -and are ongoing. The ideas on how to keep a creative venue ‘alive’ with changing market conditions and how to bridge the above mentioned gap are currently deepened. Soon these will be developed and presented soon, to be integrated into a business model. The community around the idea is lively requesting updates.
“We hired ModelMinds to run an interactive information gathering evening to provide data for a new venture. We had initially considered organising the event ourselves but in retrosepect I’m very happy that we didn’t. The preparation sessions made sure that we were happy with the content of the evening and that we focused the attendees to get the results we were interested in. Highly recommended.” (Mark Coleman – Director at MixTup and Sofware Developer at TomTom)