Dr Nico Meißner is Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director (Learning & Teaching) at Griffith Film School, Australia’s largest film school. He is researching and writing on entrepreneurship in the creative industries and the intricate relations between storytelling and innovation. He was the inaugural Dean of the Faculty of Cinematic Arts in Malaysia and has taught documentary filmmaking, storytelling and entrepreneurship in the UK, Finland, Portugal, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Colombia and Australia.

As part of my engagement with DreamSpace Academy, we held two workshops: a one-day StoryLab, using an ethnomediaology approach for authentic story development, followed by a 4-day StoryMapping workshop that uses storytelling sensitivities to solve complex problems and generate innovative solutions.

During the StoryLab workshop, we worked with 20 young people from Batticaloa, building techniques and the confidence to tell authentic stories. The StoryMapping workshop focused specifically on DreamSpace Academy and worked with seven core team members. We tackled the problem of DreamSpace's visibility in the local community and arrived at the Single Question: What if...we train youth ambassadors by solving real-world problems in their communities and captured their journey through authentic videos? We then spent the final day of our workshop to gather photographs and turned them into an authentic Innovation Story.

Maite is partner at The Morph Company, a Berlin-based consultancy for Innovation and Transformation. Her core experience is in impact-driven tech entrepreneurship, Design Thinking and agile product development.

While working in Europe, Canada, Cuba, Maite has experienced innovation approaches in different regions of the world. Today she helps organisations, their leaders and teams to establish authentic relationships with their users and to innovate with purpose in our rapid changing digital age.

Maite gave a five-days Design Thinking training to 16 members of the core team of the DreamSpace Academy. In this workshop, the team worked on designing user-centric solution ideas to specific challenges related to the DreamSpace Academy. The training consisted of a combination of theoretical inputs and hands-on team work. The participants applied different methods and tools for qualitative user research, creative ideation, prototyping, testing and iteration of their solution ideas.

After framing and redefining the initial problems, the teams specifically worked on the strategic challenges of “How to gain trust from the parents of young boys and girls in Batticaloa for innovative and non-conventional projects of DreamSpace”? and “How to create meaningful partnerships with schools and other relevant institutions in Batticaloa?”

Besides developing concrete ideas for the application in future projects of the DreamSpace Academy, this training also allowed the team to sharpen its ability to develop innovative ideas and learn how to pass this spirit on to other members of the organization. The team also reflected around the attitudes, values and principles associated with user-centered design.