Here are Umut and Alex and we want to give you a little insight behind the scenes of Open Innovation City. Since the beginning of June we are interns at Open Innovation City and could already get a very good impression of the daily routine of the team. Most of the time you can find us working at the Pioneers Club in the heart of Bielefeld's old town. However, during our weekly team meetings, it can also happen that we meet with the whole team at the Fachhochschule des Mittelstands or resort to digital alternatives.
An important part of the studies is the internship phase, where you get insights into the daily routine of a company. For us, it was important to be in a working environment where everyone's opinion counts and you have an open exchange. In our opinion, this is the only way to achieve the greatest positive learning effects.
The expectations for Open Innovation City were very high because this is a project with a great deal of potential and charisma for the entire OWL region.
As an interim conclusion after one and a half months, we can say that we are very happy to be part of the team, to have had this experience and to be able to contribute fully. What we didn't expect, however, was that we were thrown right into the deep end.
Right at the beginning of the internship, we were put directly to the test by participating in Makerthon OWL. A digital event where Open Innovation City was responsible for supervising one of the challenges. Full of self-confidence, we can claim that we passed this baptism of fire very successfully. But that was not all, after the exciting weekend we continued directly with the preparation of the BIE City Hackathon, which we organized together with the digitalization office of the city of Bielefeld. Our team was not spared the current challenges either, and with a lot of ingenuity and (wo*)manpower we organized a weekend where a large number of people, both digital and analog, came together to help shape the transformation of the city. At this point, it paid off that every single team member was able to contribute to us with their individual skills.
Despite the allocation of clear task packages, we were still amazed at how much freedom we were given to implement the solutions. After the successful preparation and briefing of the participants, we also appeared as "fellow hackers" and were able to gain valuable experience during the development sprint.
Currently we are involved in many tasks around the trend book, the upcoming events (from the coordination of service providers to the agenda) and the office opening. In our day-to-day work, we are responsible for the varied posts on the Open Innovation City social media channels.
With our creative and refreshing nature, we can regularly lend a hand to the team with our perspectives. Be it during joint brainstorming phases for upcoming events, the creation of a newsletter or even research work for planned marketing campaigns.
We are looking forward to the upcoming month and a half that we will spend with the Open Innovation City team. With our friendly and helpful colleagues and the relaxed working atmosphere, further work here will definitely not be difficult for us.
