Coaching is one of the main elements at UNLOCK. The coaches will be at your side to accelerate your idea and guide you to develop the full potential of your project. What coaching means for us, how the coaches will support you and who are the lead coaches at UNLOCK 2021 – you will find out in this blogpost.
Turning an idea into a prototype is an exciting challenge: Decisions must be made and later rejected. Everyone has to find their individual role while the team must come together. Work processes must be developed and adapted again and again.
Three months is not a long time for a project to get up and running. To not lose sight of the big picture and to master the many ups and downs, we believe that every team can profit from a mentor with a fresh view from the outside. Our lead coaches will accompany you from the very beginning to a concrete implementation plan – by applying agile practices and giving you methodological support. They will push you forward with creative processes for growing your personal and professional potential. And they will instruct you in getting specific knowledge, skills and perspectives.
To support the teams in the best possible way we opt for needs-oriented coaching as the main element of the program. This means that the coaches have a lot of freedom in responding to the individual needs of the teams and their projects. They bring along a set of different methods and find the right one for every situation. Depending on your project status, coaching may include understanding the needs of your users and validating hypotheses, ideating and brainstorming new ideas, creating prototypes of the desired products, conducting user testing and much more. The coaches are agile practitioners and help you take on new challenges with an agile mindset.
What all our coaches have in common is their great experience in guiding teams through all project development phases. They bring in different creative and collaborative working methods in order to get the best out of the teams and the projects. We chose coaches with experience in the areas of social innovation, open source development, Free Knowledge or social entrepreneurship so that they know about the needs of impact-driven projects.
Eileen Wagner has a focus on public interest technologies and worked for campaigns in the field of open data and digital rights. Fabian Gampp is co-founder of the Education Innovation Lab and creates new impulses to the education landscape. Florian Strenge has experience in urban development and a background in psychology and design. Klara Lindner is a service designer and co-founded a social business from scratch. Mana Taheri combines her expertise in design and social justice and is experienced in visual thinking. Veronika Petrova sees the importance in co-creation for organizations and has a background in human machine interaction. Elio Qoshi spends most of his time brining better design and usability to open source tools. Find more background information on our coaches here.
Sounds like exciting and experienced people to learn from, work and collaborate with, doesn’t it? Then apply now for UNLOCK 2021 and receive your own tailored coaching!
