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GloriaCosta
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

The Culture Manager Symposium initiated by Enjoy Jazz wanted to improve future festival experiences with the Design & Co-Innovation Center from SAP. They applied Design Thinking in innovative ways.

Results at a Glance:

  • First co-innovation workshop at the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg
  • New perspectives on innovating festivals
  • Creativity-oriented teamwork

The workshop space at the SAP AppHaus Heidelberg



Innovating the Festival Experience


We hosted our first co-innovation workshop “Rethinking Festivals” at the new SAP AppHaus in Heidelberg in collaboration with Enjoy Jazz, one of the most important jazz festivals worldwide. Miriam Werner and Julia Strysio from Enjoy Jazz approached the Design & Co-Innovation Center from SAP to offer a unique kind of symposium combined with advanced training and interaction. In order to find new ways to innovate festivals, we used the Design Thinking technique as a tool for creativity. As jazz has always been a mixture of various influences, the organizers invited several experts from different disciplines in the music industry to the workshop to rethink festivals. According to Miriam Müller, Internal Strategic Consultant and Design Thinking Coach at SAP, it was a new experience to kick off the AppHaus as venue with a Design Thinking workshop, which addressed a totally different topic to SAP’s core business.


Design Thinking Supports Creativity


The challenge was to find answers on how to redesign festivals in the future. With this in mind, we conducted one design thinking process iteration alongside concrete explanations of the process. Music themes were used to inspire and to enable the 50 international participants to think using new perspectives. Eight teams worked on one topic each, such as motivating a team to organize a festival, improving the process of defining an innovative festival program, or better involving the audience into a concert. In this way we showed that design does not only concern software. The process is not passive in nature, but it is a way of coordinating and developing new ideas. The participants thus spread out into Heidelberg to find an innovative location for the next Enjoy Jazz festival. They also presented the prototypes they had created using Lego, paper and role plays to the people in the city to get valuable feedback. “The prototypes ranged from abstract and future-oriented to down-to-earth and immediately realizable. This shows how Design Thinking leads to innovation – be it in small and simple or bigger, more complex solutions,” said Miriam Müller.

The teams tested their prototypes by approaching people on the streets of Heidelberg.

The AppHaus Fosters Team Spirit


“It wasoutstanding to experience diverse groups working on one concrete challenge and creating prototypes in just one day”, said Katrin Redmann, Design Strategy Consultant and Design Thinking Coach at SAP. “This was a great opening for future workshops at the AppHaus.” This first workshop has been a stimulus for effective teamwork and has created a platform to increase solidarity and understanding. The AppHaus strongly supports this idea with its functional rooms, flexible furniture, vastness, and light. This creative atmosphere encourages people to explore new thoughts and to change points of view in order to see aspects that might have been missed. The workshop has not only helped to rethink the future of festivals but also highlight creativity-oriented teamwork, which represents the most important aspect of jazz music.


”We are very happy that the Enjoy Jazz Festival had the opportunity to be the first institution to enjoy the AppHaus creative space together with 50 cultural managers from all over Europe. The collaboration with SAP was a very inspiring experience for us”, reflected Miriam Werner and Julia Strysio, Enjoy Jazz.

A day of design thinking and innovation comes to an end.