Lab

In our lab, we work together with our partners on new ideas and their realization. Although we know that every collaboration is unique, our experience has shown that a structured approach is essential for the project’s success.

Process competence

We place particular emphasis on the early stages of the innovation process. These stages are often described as the fuzzy front-end because, in many cases, only vague ideas exist at this point, and the direction that the journey will ultimately take cannot be foreseen.

However, the results of these early stages are vitally important to the success of the innovation project. That is why we not only have modern workshop equipment for generating ideas and the conceptual development of ideas, but also a wide range of technical equipment. This gives our lab the flexibility to transform into a design thinking space or a playground for building physical and virtual prototypes.

When required, we can call upon a pool of professional facilitators, graphic recorders and creativity experts who support our process and provide us with the necessary focus. In addition, our scientists are on hand to support projects with their domain expertise.

Product development

We also provide support for the practical implementation of innovation projects. We prefer to work in “sprints” – short blocks of time that usually last no more than 2–4 weeks. In each sprint, we devote ourselves entirely to a problem and attempt to find a solution to it. We endeavor to involve our future users in this process at the earliest possible stage, for example by testing the initial versions of the product directly in the museum with visitors. This allows us to learn quickly and incorporate new findings into the next sprint.

Commercialization and knowledge transfer

The final stage of the innovation process lies largely in our partners’ hands. However, we also offer support during this stage, primarily through our contacts to incubators of our scientific partner institutions. In addition, we report on our collaborations via our social media channels, in form of case studies and storytelling formats, or scientific publications. We enjoy demonstrating the joint outputs at public events or at our specially developed event formats in the Museum, such as the Meetups in the Experimental Field.

In the spirit of the learning organization, we share our lessons learned within the museum and with our innovation network . We pass on our experiences and most important observations and make them available to others. Therefore, our cooperation ends with a final debriefing in which we reflect and evaluate our collaboration.

Contact

If you have an exciting project idea and are interested in cooperating with us, please contact Jens Dobberthin at mediasphere@mfn.berlin .

More offers

Innovation network

Media and Storytelling