We bring together people who each know a different part of the problem: specialist departments, users, external experts, partner organizations, or people from the field. For us, co-creation means preparing these perspectives well and making them productive. That takes clear tasks, material people can follow, and facilitation that sharpens the discussion. In innovation projects, it's often less about the one big idea than about the moment a team realizes: we've been looking at the problem too narrowly.

Many organizations start innovation projects with a solution that's already half decided. We take the process back to the real situation of use. Who will be working with the offering later on? What routines, hurdles, or expectations are there? Interviews, personas, journey maps, and simple tests help make blind spots visible. For us, design thinking isn't a method kit for colorful workshop walls. It's a discipline of looking more closely.

Foresight helps innovation teams think beyond today's needs. Trends, scenarios, and future visions show which needs, conflicts, or markets could emerge. From these, you can derive areas to explore for new services, products, or programs. Formats like the E.ON Foresight Ambassadors are about exactly this skill: people in the organization learn to recognize future signals and to develop better questions for innovation from them.

An idea gets better as soon as it's on the table. That can be a sketch, a clickable mockup, a storyboard, a role profile, a simple model, or a speculative future artifact. Prototypes help teams realize faster what they're actually talking about. They show what's still unclear, where a concept is getting too complicated, and which assumptions need testing.

In energy, mobility, urban development, and research especially, relevant knowledge is spread across many hands. An organization knows its system, but not every situation of use. A research team knows the technology, but not every field of application. Open innovation formats open up the process to outside perspectives in a controlled way. We design such formats so that contributions don't just sit side by side at random but find a shared working logic.

An innovation project can show how an organization could work differently. Testing faster. Talking to users earlier. Showing unfinished ideas. Not treating criticism as a disruption. Such skills don't come from a toolbox of methods but from repeated experience. That's why we often design innovation processes so that teams learn the way of working as they go. In the end, there's a concept, but also more confidence in dealing with open questions.

After the innovation workshop, the hard part begins. An idea has to be explained, decided on, funded, or developed further. That takes material and processes that work inside the organization: a clear presentation, a visual concept, a short prototype, a decision board, or a small internal narrative. We think about this translation early on. That way, results become the basis for pilot projects, funding applications, or the next round of sign-off.