On the design and conduction of virtual workshops: Experiences from going digital

Workshops (e.g., Innovation and Ideation workshops, Design Sprints, etc.) and virtual workshops play a major role in today's businesses. On the one hand, they provide a methodology for interdisciplinary collaboration, and on the other hand, they help teams solve problems by developing novel ideas, often for potentially new business opportunities. At the same time, workshop participants learn to apply various creativity techniques to solve complex problems holistically. These lessons learned support participants beyond a particular workshop. By being creative and working cooperatively, they experience a new way of working together that inspires future collaboration opportunities. In addition, workshops help to spread the thinking process behind creative and collaborative work and functions as an educational tool for corporate staff. Challenged by having had to transform our highly interactive workshops into the digital space, we have identified several practices to address these problems. We present our findings on overcoming obstacles of virtual online collaboration and discuss them from a metaeducational perspective.