…as 140 students attend second Impact Week at UNILAG
Posted by Sade Williams
This year’s winner of Lufthansa Group’s 2018 Impact Week in Nigeria in partnership with University of Lagos (UNILAG) focuses on improving the relationship between technicians and customers.
The winning students designed a simple platform to bring together technicians and households, as they wanted to solve the problem of unreliable technicians who do not show up.
The jurors were convinced, as this was the first time such an idea was introduced in Nigeria: an internal rating system for customers and technicians was presented as a simple solution for a common problem, which has a really large market and is fairly easy to implement.
Around 140 students from UNILAG participated in the second annual Impact Week in Nigeria, consisting of a four-day training course in Design Thinking organized by Lufthansa.
The students were supported by a coaching team from Lufthansa colleagues, external Design Thinking Senior Coaches and local professors. Prior to the students’ Impact Week, there has been a three-day course run by nine international design thinking coaches to train 48 junior coaches – among them UNILAG lecturers as well as international Lufthansa Group staff.
Through team work, the students developed ideas and prototypes around the topics: Health & Environment, Transportation, Technopreneurship, Urban Agriculture, Tourism, Energy, Commercial Finance, Education. The students learned how to identify relevant problems in their society, how to solve these problems and how to develop business models. Other participating teams came up with fantastic ideas such as Apps for waste management, transportation and fund raising, or ideas such as making solar technique affordable for households by introducing micro financing models and payments via gradual installment based on block chain. Others developed hands-on solutions for onsite waste management, alternate usage of solar power or advocacy educational programs.
“Our employees on the other hand can and should then bring the Design Thinking method into their companies and day-to-day work,” says Claudia Rautenberg, Head of Cultural Transformation at Lufthansa Group.
“They will help us push forward with innovation processes and make our work more agile and customer-centric at the same time”, he added.
Impact Week is a globally organized and sponsored Corporate Social Responsibility initiative by the Lufthansa Group and other companies fostering entrepreneurship, innovation, and intercultural exchange through Design Thinking.
This year, the Lufthansa Group will hold five impact weeks, training more than 60 employees as Design Thinking coaches, who will together with university partners, develop business ideas with a special focus on how to develop solutions for current problems. At the end of every Impact Week, a winner is selected to receive financial support in order to implement their ideas.
In this way, the Impact Weeks have a double benefit: They foster innovation and sustainable entrepreneurship in the countries where it is being offered, while at the same time Lufthansa Group employees are being further trained.
“Our employees on the other hand can and should then bring the Design Thinking method into their companies and day-to-day work,” says Claudia Rautenberg, Head of Cultural Transformation at Lufthansa Group. “They will help us push for¬ward with innovation processes and make our work more agile and customer-centric at the same time.”
Design Thinking (DT) is an innovative, agile approach to product development in which a problem is identified from a user perspective. The objective is to solve the problem with a business model. Throughout the process, the DT method is con¬sistently focused on the needs of users. Participants will learn skills such as inno-vative, customer-oriented thinking or execution focus. The participants of the Impact Weeks will be trained by experienced Design Thinking trainers from Siemens, SAP and other companies
