We look back on an eventful year with many exciting projects and successful implementations and would like to take this opportunity to thank our customers and partners for their trustful cooperation.
We wish everyone Merry Christmas ,relaxing holidays and a good start to the New Year!
In a Christmas outfit and with a great atmosphere we had our last team day for this year around the topic of Design Thinking.
For us, design thinking is an elementary part of our daily work, which the entire team masters. In our projects, we usually face the challenge of having to work with adapted innovation and creativity methods in the environment of B2B business model development in order to achieve the best possible results. Equally important in the B2B context is the direct usability and applicability of results, solutions or prototypes.
What do we mean by design thinking and what are the benefits for companies?
The Design Thinking approach and process is a structured method to develop products, solutions and/or business models essentially from the user’s perspective. Ideas are built and created based on deep understanding of the user situation. As a rule, this always results in innovative approaches that have a clear market and customer focus. In addition, Design Thinking is used to tease out creativity in teams in a new way – particularly interesting are unconventional challenges provided as part of such a process, such as a change of role/perspective like “How would Elon Musk solve the problem?”.
For us and our partners, we see three main advantages that arise:
-> Shortening of long processes for innovation
-> Concrete results and solution approaches with direct customer reference
-> Agile working and joint innovation: employees are actively involved, can contribute their knowledge and expand it at the same time
Our joint appointment again showed how much energy is involved in “real” workshops in a personal environment. We believe it can create the culture needed to master digital transformation in many companies.
Feel free to contact us if you would like to bring a breath of fresh air into your company with the help of a Design Thinking workshop.
Last week we as NOVAZOON with Bastian Deck and Tobias Butsch were part of the jury at the Urban Tech Hackathon in Karlsruhe.
The Urban Tech project promotes European startups and SMEs in the emerging fields of healthtech, smartcity and greentech. NOVAZOON had announced four different challenges in the European consortium and therefore had the opportunity to meet, coach and evaluate the finalists.
The event was organized by Cyberforum Karlsruhe and the Cyberlab Accelerator team and brought together the challenge owners and the startups from many different countries to pitch the submitted solutions as well as ideas in the field of greentech, healthtech and smart city.
It was an inspiring day with innovative ideas, inspiring solutions and great teams – we were very happy to be part of it!
Congratulations to the winners and fingers crossed for the final round in the race for 55.000 € prize money!
In our more tech-related post this week, we want to talk about the design tool that we deploy at NOVAZOON. We are using Figma as design tool and “first step” along our full stack development process of applications or platforms.
Figma is a collaborative design tool for creating screen designs and clickable prototypes. With its online functionality, it allows multiple people to work on the same file at the same time and share ideas.
However, before product designers and developers can start with the screen design or the actual prototype, the hierarchy of the individual pages and their relationship to each other must be clarified. Through multiple user stories and sitemaps, the basis of the application, its application structure and the single pages are defined.
After the sitemap has been iterated several times, the next step is the actual design prototyping. We are distinguishing between two phases. During the first phase we are working on a low-fidelity prototype, which is focused on the type of information and how it is distributed across screens. These are simple sketches. In the second phase we create a high-fidelity prototype, which consists of elaborated screens that show actual content, colors and branding elements.
The most mature form of prototyping is the interactive click dummy. The process from high-fidelity prototype to interactive click dummy is not a too big one, thanks to the Figma design tool. With an interactive click dummy, initial user tests can be performed and the general user behavior, interactions and animations in the application can be clarified. Additionally, Figma allows to export design files to a smartphone as well as sharing the interactive prototype via link, so that it can be accessed via browser.
Have you heard about Figma before? Please feel free to share your experience at our LinkedIn channel.
We are also looking forward to receiving feedback about the technical topics we should discuss next time.
Our joint venture MAEX was presented in the Gründerszene section as an innovative health-tech start-up by the Karlsruhe Chamber of Industry and Commerce.
In the article, the “Purpose” and the vision become clear: MAEX pursues the goal of optimally supporting post-hospital care for cardiac patients and thereby successfully helping to shape the recovery process. In simple words:
MAEX goal is to help people with heart disease live longer and better lives!
This goal is more relevant than ever, because the most common cause of death in Germany is cardiovascular disease. In the future, patients will be accompanied on the basis of a digital platform and with the help of an app. Thus, individual follow-up care can be carried out holistically digitally and make a lasting contribution to the recovery of cardiac patients.
In the first round of financing, MAEX – in addition to NOVAZOON – gained experts in strategic corporate financing in the form of CTF Campus Technologies Freiburg GmbH, R&D company of the University of Freiburg and the University Hospital Freiburg, and Spaderna, Brückner & Cie. Two further cooperation partners are the University Medical Center Freiburg with Prof. Dr. Dr. hc. Manfred Zehender, Deputy Medical Director of the Clinic for Cardiology and Angiology of the University Heart Center at the University Hospital and the Max Grundig Clinic. one of Germany’s leading private clinics engaged with MAEX.
Together with the cooperation partners, the MAEX team will now push ahead with product development and seek approval as a medical device.
We are delighted to be a founding partner of MAEX and to contribute to the digital transformation in healthcare
Click here to go to the MAEX LinkedIn channel.
Click here for the article in the IHK magazine
Click here for the press release: Pressbox