The retreat that doesn’t stand still
A retreat puts your team down in a nice spot for two days. There’s talk, flip charts fill up with post-its and there’s an action list. On Monday the daily grind starts again, and the action list goes in a drawer. ChallengeBus turns that around. Your team isn’t stuck in one place, but on the move. As the saying goes, travel makes a storyteller. And you’ll come back with plenty of stories to tell.
During the trip you visit organisations that are further along with the challenge you’re working on, or that have tackled it in a completely different way. An organisation that uses AI as an extra department. A municipality that has organised participation differently. A manufacturer from a completely different industry that ran into the same problem and found its own solution. Look beyond the walls of your own industry and field, and you’ll see solutions that stay invisible from the meeting room.
Between those visits the team processes what it has seen, on a bus nobody can leave, until there’s something you can move forward with. The concept is the same for everyone. We tailor the route, the visits and the assignment to your organisation and your question.
Companies
Innovation often gets stuck in the meeting room. A good idea goes on the action list, the action list disappears under the daily grind, and six months later nobody is responsible for it anymore. Meanwhile everyone knows something needs to happen with AI, with new revenue models or with the way departments work past each other, but nobody knows exactly where to start. ChallengeBus takes a cross-section of your organisation out of that meeting room and literally puts them on the road. Along the way you look over the shoulder of companies that have already taken that step, in your own industry or far outside it. And you come back with something that works: a new product, a service or an internal initiative that doesn’t end up on the action list, because it already exists.
Government & trade associations
Societal challenges are rarely solved within the walls of a single organisation. Participation, sustainability, collaboration across the chain: these are tasks that require parties who normally barely speak to each other. A ChallengeBus expedition literally puts those parties on the same bus, with the same time pressure and the same impossibility of walking away when things get difficult. Along the way you visit places together where such a challenge has already been tackled: in another region, another sector or across the border. That creates a shared picture of what is possible, instead of everyone holding on to their own policy paper.
Knowledge institutions
Every university, university of applied sciences and vocational college knows the feeling: it’s always the same companies that find their way in. They offer internships, sit on the industry advisory board and bring in research questions. Beyond them is a much larger group of SMEs that are at least as interesting for your research, your programmes and your applied research groups, but that you can’t get through the door yourself. Not because they aren’t interested, but because the step towards a knowledge institution feels big to them.
ChallengeBus gives you a reason to knock on the door. A bus full of students, lecturers and researchers travelling from company to company is an initiative entrepreneurs get excited about. Companies welcome the group, show students around, proudly show what they’re working on and hand over questions that students and research groups can get to work on. In a few hours, a relationship emerges that would otherwise have taken years. And you build a network of companies that afterwards do know they can walk into your institution with their questions.
In the third edition we ran with HZ University of Applied Sciences, in collaboration with Dockwize and JRCZ, we split 80 students across two buses. In twelve hours we visited companies across the protein transition chain. From the first growth, via producers, all the way to the product on the plate. From conversations with inventors to qualitative market research at the Middelburg market. We were looking for opportunities to use seaweed, for example: not from a lecture hall, but on the road, at the companies themselves.
Healthcare
Staff shortages and digitalisation call for new care concepts, but the time and space to really dive into them is often missing in day-to-day practice. ChallengeBus gives healthcare organisations exactly that: a chance to get away from the obligations of the work floor. With visits to organisations inside and outside healthcare that already work differently, and with the same pressure and focus that has already led to buildable solutions elsewhere.
What an expedition costs depends on the duration, the group size, the route and the degree of customisation. That conversation starts with an intake, not with a price list.