Lufthansa Group’s Impact Week: Winner focuses on customers-technicians relationship

December 2, 2018

90 1 minute read

This year’s winner of Lufthansa Group’s Impact Week in Nigeria in partnership with University of Lagos (UNILAG) focuses on improving the relationship between technicians and customers.

This was contained in a statement signed by Hakeem Jimo and made available to journalists in Lagos.

The winning students designed a simple platform to bring together technicians and households, as they wanted to solve the problem of unreliable technicians who do not show up. The jurors were convinced, as this was the first time such an idea was introduced in Nigeria: an internal rating system for customers and technicians was presented as a simple solution for a common problem, which has a really large market and is fairly easy to implement.

About 140 students from UNILAG participated in the second annual Impact Week in Nigeria, consisting of a four-day training course in Design Thinking organized by Lufthansa. The students were supported by a coaching team from Lufthansa colleagues, external Design Thinking Senior Coaches and local professors.

Prior to the students’ Impact Week, there has been a three-day course run by nine international design thinking coaches to train 48 junior coaches – among them UNILAG lecturers as well as international Lufthansa Group staff.

Through team work, the students developed ideas and prototypes around the topics: Health & Environment, Transportation, Technopreneurship, Urban Agriculture, Tourism, Energy, Commercial Finance, Education. The students learned how to identify relevant problems in their society, how to solve these problems and how to develop business models. Other participating teams came up with fantastic ideas such as Apps for waste management, transportation and fund raising, or ideas such as making solar technique affordable for households by introducing micro financing models and payments via gradual installment based on block chain. Others developed hands-on solutions for onsite waste management, alternate usage of solar power or advocacy educational programs.

“Our employees on the other hand can and should then bring the Design Thinking method into their companies and day-to-day work,” says Claudia Rautenberg, Head of Cultural Transformation at Lufthansa Group. “They will help us push forward with innovation processes and make our work more agile and customer-centric at the same time.”