Case Study: Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
Metropolia is the largest university of applied sciences in Finland. Exceptional times have led Metropolia to look for new types of tools and methods that allow people to share their views digitally, while creating a sense of belonging.
Internal Development through Dialogue: an Inclusive Approach
Finland's largest university of applied sciences, Metropolia, has an in-house support team Parru, which facilitates dialogue and employee engagement in various projects and processes at Metropolia. The team works with a dialogical, co-creating and participatory approach. Parru team is an internal Innoduel superuser at Metropolia, using the tool and method in many of its workshops and projects.
Minna Kaihovirta works as a dialogue manager at Metropolia and is involved in Parru team that facilitates dialogue and employee engagement in various development processes. Her background in speech communication and successes even in tight communication situations provide Minna with a perspective on interaction and enabling it in different contexts.
Anne-Mari Raivio works as an expert in Metropolia’s Parru team facilitating dialogue and employee engagement in various development processes. She is passionate about meaningful encounters both face-to-face and online.
Emphasizing Emotions in Co-creation and Leveraging Creativity
One example of the work of Metropolia's Parru team is when the team helped their client crystallize communications related to research, development and innovation. More than 70 participants from almost all Finnish universities of applied sciences participated in the workshop. Parru decided to facilitate the co-creation at the workshop using Innoduel.
During the workshop, open responses were produced and prioritized with the help of Innoduel. Parru team focused especially on asking creatively formulated open questions and positivity. The workshop also embraced empathic viewpoints through taking on different roles.
Parru team found that working with Innoduel this way evoked a wide range of emotions in the participants, such as the fun of participating and the commitment to contribute. Positive emotions have been studied to increase commitment to the topic being worked on, so the end result was desirable.
“We got to the same feeling that you would experience at best in face-to-face workshops, even though it was an online-workshop.”
Ideas as They Are, without Moderation
Parru team points out that when using Innoduel, the ideas and responses produced by the participants do not pass through the facilitator’s interpretive lenses. Innoduel’s operational logic does not include editing or categorizing responses by anybody. For some participants, it is important that their own thinking is not modified by a note taker or anybody else, but the response is visible to others as it is meant by the respondent. – It's not me who records the views of the participants, but the voice is genuinely from the people, the team says.
Facilitating the Facilitator’s Work
For Parru team, Innoduel has proven to be a wonderfully stable tool. The facilitator receives ready-made reports from the workshops, which significantly reduces post-workshop workload. The workshop participants also receive the co-created outcomes faster.
Parru team also gives special praise for Innoduel's reliability. The tool works, whether there are 100 or 1000 participants. The facilitator does not have to worry about the functionality of the tool and can focus on her own work.
It is also valuable for the facilitator that everything is in the same package. There is no need to spend unnecessary time to familiarize yourself with the tool when your own time is limited. Innoduel is so easy to use that it frees up time to ponder the right questions and create a sense of inclusion instead of focusing on technological challenges.
"It's a great relief when the facilitator doesn't have to fetch all sorts of gadgets of the world and think about where those ideas were collected and how we get the idea prioritization done. With Innoduel, everything is in the same package."
When technology works well, encounters become more relevant - even when they happen online.
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What is Method Innoduel
Organizations that are successful have realized that competitive advantage is only gained when everybody is onboard and strives to achieve a common goal. Method Innoduel is a process to engage stakeholders and manage change in a better way. Instead of top-down, the approach is bottom-up.
If lasting organizational change is to happen, we need to create positive emotion: a sense of belonging, an environment where it is safe to take initiative, ideate, and express thoughts. Many times organizational development projects overlook the individual's perspective. Grassroot-level employees might be asked a few questions in a survey every once in a while, but they don't get the feeling that the effort made any difference - so why bother the next time.
Method Innoduel makes sure we respect the time people take to give input and make it matter.
In Method Innoduel respect is inbuilt in every step, helping facilitate positive co-creation experiences and minimize the "warehousing time" of collected data. Knowledge is derived from gathered data. We are not just collecting ideas, insights, and data for the sake of data. Instead, use it efficiently.
How to co-create value with the Innoduel app
Innoduel has created an app to help you co-create value together with your key stakeholders.
- First, you ask – in a better way – by allowing the participants to formulate their thoughts in an open-ended format.
- Next, the answers are entered in a dual comparison mode. The participants will select the winning argument and upvote it.
- The whole process is completely anonymous.
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