01 VOLKSWAGEN – Beyond Cars – Driving VW beyond cars, 10 years ahead of its time

Consulting project, conceptualisation direction & facilitation  Already in 2009, Nadine Meisel challenged Volkswagen: “What would you do without cars?”  She inspired and helped the organisation to transform this question into new business opportunities beyond cars end-to-end: from the initial strategy concept, the discovery of non-obvious resources & markets, three applied new business opportunity concepts translated into concrete designs of product & service lines, to new marketing & sales strategies beyond dealers.    read more

02 Mobles114 – From bankruptcy to boom with “zero investment” in “no time”

Business Consultant & Strategic Product Designer A Spanish business based on a conventional bookshelf system needed to reinvent itself out of bankruptcy during a deep national and sectoral crisis. Combining existing elements of the system (production, logistics, and resources) in a smart and easy way, we created several new uses as well as an attractive design for northern Europe. This opened up new markets with zero investment. The new shelf system was marketed within a few weeks, was presented at the Milan furniture fair, won several Design prizes, and was exhibited in design museums.    read more

03 LEGO – Beyond Bricks – Turning LEGO’s challenge of its expiring patent into new business opportunities

Conceptualisation & facilitation of Design Thinking Workshop Just when Lego’s patent for its brick system expired, the company needed to reinvent itself. Nadine Meisel inspired Lego’s decision makers to transform this challenge into opportunities, e.g. to open up new markets.  We generated new strategies, various concepts and designs for “New Lego Systems for girls & adults” to integrate new users into the play experience to double LEGO’s target market.   Outcome in just one week: Deep user & market understanding, two new markets through five new concepts and designs of entire New Lego ecosystems for girls & adults. Feedback by Marta Tantos, Senior Creative Director at LEGO Group: “Amazing! In only one workshop we have created material for years.”    read more

04 CISCO – New business solution to be patented

Lateral Shortcuts® Workshop

Nadine Meisel guided Cisco’s UX & Design Director and his team in a one-day Lateral Shortcuts® workshop that reframed their challenge and resulted in a patentable solution. For confidentiality reasons the presentation sheet had to be blurred in the following video:

05 DESIGUAL – Tackling tough challenges & reinventing business during Covid-19 lockdown

Lateral Shortcuts® project In 2020, the global clothing brand Desigual suffered from the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, accelerating a decline in sales that had already started years ago.  With Desigual’s core decision & management team, we used the energy of this challenging situation to drive change. After extracting the company’s essences (history, competences, … ) we discovered and prioritised challenges as well as non-obvious potentials & resources.  We created "Desigual’s Innovation & Design Process 2020+" including strategy and training for adopting the Lateral Shortcuts® mindset and approach as well as “formulas” for how to translate visions into tangible product innovation effectively and easily.     read more

06 AIRBUS – Unknotting global challenges across disciplines in just one week

Speed sprint conceptualisation and facilitation Nadine Meisel helped Airbus Fire Safety and 10 worldwide stakeholders,  IT & simulation experts as well as universities discover and leverage their non-obvious resources, co-create their common project vision and goals, the team & stakeholders’ map, an optimised process chain, the simulation software architecture, required actions, deliverables, the top level roadmap, work packages as well as the final pitch. With her purpose-driven Beyond the Box approach, Nadine was able to leverage the top scientists’ skills and expertise to shorten their processes by half and maximise the outcome & delivery to be implemented directly.  This speed sprint project was contracted through umlaut company.    read more

07 SUEZ – Discovering and leveraging non-obvious resources across companies and departments

Series of Lateral Shortcuts® consulting projects Nadine Meisel got sent to various companies and departments of SUEZ to discover and tackle difficult challenges of any kind (from corporate strategy to service design, technical or human resource related issues) with her Lateral Shortcuts® approach.  She run several consulting projects (including workshops) across companies and departments – for SUEZ, Grupo Agbar, Aqualogy, Cetaqua and Crea, focusing on creating non-obvious use cases and smart solutions for unexpected business challenges with zero investment*.  *E.g. After a big transformation process Cetaqua realised that new measurements were neither working nor adopted by the employees and they were still facing major challenges  but were left with no budget nor time to solve them.  After having prioritised the 12 most urgent and important challenges as well as non-obvious resources together, Nadine delivered 120 solution concepts that got all selected and easily implemented within a few months. See the recommendation by SUEZ's digital innovation, business development and product manager Daniel Cardelús below.    read more

08 PUMA – Optimizing design processes while designing key-style bestsellers for Puma

Consultant & Footwear Designer Nadine Meisel designed highly user-centered key-style sneakers in response to PUMA’s challenging briefing to understand and meet the needs of international street girls with new sneaker lines being technical & motorsporty as well as distinguishing & subtle, standing-out & clean, short-term & longterm success at the same time.  She applied her Lateral Shortcuts® approach to optimize Design Thinking, shortcutting the three phases, “understanding, prototyping and testing” as well as the co-creation with the user, which reduced the entire design process from 6 months to 6 weeks.  Instead of interpreting long market researches, Nadine Meisel gathered insights by involving relevant users from the beginning and co-created with them with daily testing and iterating to make sure users' needs were 100% met. PUMA’s innovation team was amazed by her effective approach which led to a bestselling result. They asked her to train their Designers in her approach and to apply it to higher level challenges such as business, marketing, and sales strategies.     read more

09 HAILO – ”Innovation without investment” by leveraging Hailo’s essences in just 1 week

Strategic design & innovation consulting project  It was time to innovate, recover and strengthen Hailo’s number one position for stairs and garbage bins in the international market through leveraging the company’s goals, brand, competences, technology and resources. Through tiny modifications in existing products, services and production processes, Nadine Meisel created big value gains that were easy to implement in different areas of the company. Deliveries included 3 Business Strategy concepts, 3 product-service transformations and 3 concrete patentable Product Design proposals.    read more

10 SEAT S.A. – Co-creating new business strategies & opportunities, products & services

Series of strategic design & innovation consulting projects & workshops The car industry is highly challenged and needs new approaches. In several consulting projects and workshop settings with SEAT senior managers, we applied the Lateral Shortcuts® methodology to reframe their challenges and co-created a series of “New E-Mobility Business Opportunities, Services & Products” as well as “Future After Sales Business” Strategies among others.  Five of the created “Business Opportunity” concepts and four of the Strategy concepts were selected for implementation and two were implemented within two years. See this reference statement by SEAT’s Global After Sales Director Dr. Lutz.    read more

11 grow platform GmbH – A Bosch Company – Co-creating repeatable big business for Bosch

Lateral Shortcuts® workshop With the CEO of Bosch's grow platform worldwide, his senior management team, users and experts, we co-created, defined and optimised grow 2.0’s goals, its product, an innovation process as well as required actions and responsibilities for a successful implementation in a highly dynamic, interactive and visual way. The result was an innovation process to co-create “repeatable & replicable big business for Bosch.     read more

12 MUSEO BALENCIAGA – New sustainable & user-centered fashion concept Neo Couture

Conceptualisation, direction of strategy paper content & design An investment failure, a huge million-euro Museum building built for a small exhibition of Cristobal Balenciaga in a tiny village in Basque Country needed to be filled with content and visitors to not go bankrupt.   Translating the revolutionary Cristobal Balebciaga’s essences into nowadays scenarios, we created a new user-centered and sustainable fashion concept – “Neo-Couture” – as a strategic, research and educational program to apply Basque companies’ high-tech expertise to revolutionary fashion concepts and attract visitors worldwide through focused events. In collaboration with Elisva, Nadine Meisel conceptualised and directed the design of the strategy paper for the museum and basque country. She also opened the first “Neo Couture Design Week” with an inspirational speech and ran the first workshop with international celebrities from the fashion industry. Win-win-win-win outcome: Through this revolutionary concept, participants, experts and tourists get attracted from worldwide providing income for the Basque country. The museum gets filled with content and visitors, high-tech companies gain applications and visibility  for their technology, Elisava Design school can provide content and services. All stakeholders participate in self-expanding revenues from the new brand.    read more

13 VALLBANC – New clean, transparent and user-centered approach to private banking

Lateral Shortcuts® & Design Thinking workshops Vall Banc's vision is “to become Andorra’s most respected private bank, and to rebuild the reputation of Andorra as an important European financial center”. With its director and senior managers, and in co-creation with its wealth clients, we applied Design Thinking and Lateral Shortcuts® to create a series of solutions to various of their challenges; we developed ways to improve the bank’s image, created a unique customer experience, and optimised client services. Results: A new vision & mission with hundreds of innovative + effective + easy to implement solutions. Areas of applications: different areas of the bank such as the external appearance of physical and digital interfaces (architecture, facade, entrance hall, website user experience design), customer services and internal operations (communication platform and office designs).    read more

14 ZKM Karlsruhe – “Plato’s Cave Experience” – a circular journey across sciences

Conceptualisation, realisation and inspirational speaking Daniel Libeskind challenged his students to “Build Plato’s Cave” (see Plato's Cave Allegory and this Short Reading Text). Nadine Meisel answered by translating the allegory of Plato’s Cave from philosophy to mathematics, then into a construction plan for a mechanism that generates the experience or the relativity of reality as described in the original allegory. Awarded with Günther Schroff Scholarship by leading scientists and experts such as Peter Weibel and Peter Sloterdijk and other Philosophers, Mathematicians and Politicians at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2003. Exposed in 10 years HfG@ZKM Karlsruhe 2002, and MIBA Inventor Museum Barcelona 2012. Published in books: “The Daniel Libeskind Research Studio” 2010 and “Karlsruher Ikonotope 1992-2002“    read more

15 Telefonica Innovation Alpha – “Plato’s Cave Experience” applied to co-creating a healthier world

Inspirational talks & workshop Alpha’s top innovators and scientists from all over the world used Nadine Meisel’s cross-scientific “Plato’s Cave Experience” project (see Success Story ZKM Karlsruhe) to experiment with the relativity of reality in a series of inspirational talks, experiments and a final workshop. After they had tested the device, we translated the insights gained into Beyond the Box opportunities for a healthier world. Feedback among others: “It’s like having a real-life flashback of the now!”, ”We got enough insights and material to be inspired and to keep working on them for years.”    read more