“A small virus has now achieved what masses of change management programs have not: Corona makes things possible within days what was previously unthinkable.” [Meyer 2020]
The current Covid-19 pandemic shows with all its force the relevance of an active innovation culture in the current digital change. Ruthlessly, deficits of companies and the economy in their digital development have been pointed out — the pandemic briefly acts as an ejector seat for the digital transformation.

The thesis deals with the search for problem areas in the innovation process and the relevance of innovative capability regarding the current change of society and economy. The focus lies on the search for starting points as well as the possible application of the strategic designer's competences in the entrepreneurial context.

The result is KOSI. The “Kick-Off Sprint for Innovators“ is a sprint for inter- and multidisciplinary teams in companies, agencies or institutions, freely accessible to everyone. The goal is a productive kick-off for the generation of ideas and evaluation of the innovation process. Participants are encouraged to put forth existing implicit and explicit knowledge, needs and their assessments of the current state and future changes without a large time and cost factor. Thus, this information can be discussed, ordered and analysed together.

This collection and evaluation of information creates a common basis for communication between the different disciplines within the team. This can reveal valuable perspectives and potentials for subsequent phases. The broad perspective gained enables the participants to productively move on to scenario building in order to place the innovation impulses in a systematic context and to derive opportunity areas for the idea generation process. The insights can either be used as a suggestion for the development of ideas and concepts, or they can help to jointly consider future changes and to derive potentials and risks from them.

In short, KOSI makes it possible to generate relevant knowledge, analyse it and explore new scope for actions without spending a large amount of time.

The goal of our work was to positively influence the communication and the resulting innovative ability in the company. By developing the workshop concept, we were able to draw attention to the problem areas and the complexity at the beginning of the innovation process and therefore to point out possible areas of action for strategic designers.