InsightsOut
Museum exhibitions and public panels feed outside views into B2B innovation
Bringing Tomorrow’s Ideas to Today’s Conversations
- Key fact
- 25Interviews across three stakeholder groups
- Team
- 7 master students
- Disciplines
- Computer Science · Digital Health · IT Systems Engineering · Software Systems Engineering · Industrial Engineering
- Further partners
What happened, step by step.
Challenge
Established B2B companies must innovate in fields nobody has explored yet, with little knowledge of possible futures. ZEISS asked how public spaces, especially museums, could feed this early innovation process.
What the team learned
Innovation managers draw more inspiration from artists' creative process than from finished artworks. Artists want outside input, but chances to work with companies are barely visible.
What they built
A three-step programme connecting innovators, curators, artists and the public: panel discussions, a museum exhibition and a web app. AI turns discussion insights into posts, and a chatbot retrieves everything the programme has generated.
How it evolved
- Step 1Eleven prototypes in the critical function phase; four tested in depth with artists, curators and innovation managers.
- Step 2Meet4Lunch matched artists and innovation managers for lunch; breaks were often busy and older users found digital matchmaking unfamiliar.
- Step 3A panel-discussion prototype shown at the winter SUGAR+ presentation became the starting point of the final programme.
Impact
Stated value: companies gain external perspectives and a check on societal trends, museums stay relevant, artists gain creative freedom and the public joins the discussion.
In their words
Company Culture can definitely benefit from external perspectives and exchange.
Full project text
The team’s original texts from the project page.
InsightsOut is a comprehensive solution that bridges insights from B2B companies, the art world and the public through a collaborative, three-step process. Centralized via a web application, it facilitates seamless access to all generated knowledge, fostering innovation and engagement across diverse sectors.
Challenge
Established B2B companies often have the challenge of innovating in fields that have not been explored yet. This early innovation is especially challenging because companies need to consider various aspects like current trends. With more knowledge about a possible future, they could reduce the risks in early decision making.
One source of inspiration for such processes can be the crowd knowledge found in public spaces, such as museums. For this project, we investigated how we can integrate public spaces, in particular museums, into the early innovation process of B2B companies.
Solution
With InsightsOut we created an ecosystem that connects different stakeholders from B2B companies like innovators and decision-makers, museums like curators and artists, as well as the public. The center of InsightsOut is a three-step program that consists of panel discussions, a museum exhibition, and a web application that enables users to retrieve any knowledge generated within the ecosystem.
By utilizing a chatbot they can gather information that emerged during discussions or was entered into the web app by users during or after the visit of the exhibition.
Impact
We enable B2B companies to gain more external perspectives by utilizing collective wisdom. They can get insights into current societal trends and evaluate whether the decisions they are making go in the right direction. Also, they will get a tool with which they can easily collect knowledge from a broader audience and easily access it afterward.
Museums will stay relevant as they bring companies that are working on state-of-the-art technologies into their environments. Artists benefit from the possibility to freely work on artworks contained in the exhibition. Furthermore, the public can actively participate in discussions and shape their future development.
From the field to the prototype.
Who built it.
Ala Sahada
M.Sc. Digital Health
Ashish Patel
M.Sc. Software Systems Engineering
Jonas Baltruschat
M.Sc. Digital Health
Lucas Reisener
M.Sc. IT Systems Engineering
Felicitas Baur
M.Sc. Industrial Engineering and Management
Jan Wohlfarth
M.Sc. Industrial Engineering and Management
Jonas Scholz
M.Sc. Computer Science