English | EN 
SogetiLabs organises a meetup with a client twice a year. For two and a half years, these meetups happened online in different formats. In 2022, we picked up the cadence. 20 Of our SogetiLabs fellows met again in Stockholm, Sweden on June 16 and 17, with Trafikverket .
Meetup in Paris
January 19-21 2023, we met in Paris. Present was a great team of 33 SogetiLabs fellows from 12 countries and 8 representatives from our client Manitou. During 1.5 days, the participants worked in three teams. With great energy, they tackled three of Manitou’s innovation challenges. They used a condensed version of our Thinkubator approach for applied innovation to create 3 MLP-style prototypes.
3 Challenges, 3 teams, 3 working prototypes
Each team in the meetup consisted of 10-12 carefully selected SogetiLabs fellows: data scientists, engineers, designers, architects, a tech lead and a moderator to guide the team through the process. Of course, the client stakeholders were also part of the teams: the business owner, IT experts and a marketing representative to bring in the client perspective.
While they started out with quite broad challenges, they narrowed them down to the essence, found solutions for each and created working prototypes. The concepts and prototypes were then pitched to the Manitou team. Their response was that we “exceeded their expectations” and we came up with ideas they hadn’t yet thought of.
Digital Happiness on Saturday morning
On Saturday morning, the SogetiLabs participants welcomed Claudia Senik, Happiness researcher at Sorbonne University, to hear about her latest research. After that, we engaged in a workshop aimed at coming up with creative ideas on how to make each other more digitally happy using design thinking techniques. Each team came up with a concept that was positive and unexpected for the subject.
SogetiLabs meetups – What’s next
We enjoyed the process and connecting in person. We had some great conversations, take aways and learnings. Stay tuned for the aftermovie! And of course, we are planning for the next meetup already.
