A Design Sprint to solve a real challenge
How can we collaboratively, quickly, and effectively solve a key challenge faced by an organisation?
As part of the ”global volunteer program week of possibilities”, organized by ABBVIE and the ABBVIE FOUNDATION, we conducted two Design Sprints in Athens and Thessaloniki, in collaboration with ethelon.
Through an interactive workshop on Design Thinking, 40 employees in Athens and 10 employees in Thessaloniki worked together to solve a key challenge faced by two local NGOs: STEPS NGO and the center for social action and innovation.
We designed two intensive Design Sprints to train participants in the four key stages:
✅ Empathy: Understanding real needs through research and system analysis
✅ Ideation: Generating innovative solutions
✅ Prototyping: Rapid development of prototype solutions
✅ Testing: Implementing and validating solutions
These workshops empowered employees to collaboratively design impactful solutions, fostering problem-solving skills and hands-on engagement with social challenges.
The participants and the representatives from the two organizations engaged in a practical, hands-on approach, utilizing key Design Thinking tools, including:
- Problem Definition: clearly framing the core challenge
- User Persona: understanding the end user’s needs
- Journey mapping: visualizing the user experience
- Service blueprinting: analyzing service interactions
- Brainstorming: generating creative solutions
Through these workshops, we addressed the real needs of two organizations in Thessaloniki and Athens, collaborating to develop meaningful and actionable solutions.
Often, we believe we fully understand a problem, but Design Thinking encourages us to take a step back and uncover the “need behind the need” to analyze challenges from multiple perspectives and invest time in understanding the needs of all stakeholders involved.
Participants were introduced to a fresh way of thinking, innovative tools, and a creative mindset, and we sincerely thank them for their participation!
50 participants
2 days
