Femtec is a scholarship program for female STEM students. These women pursue degrees dominated by men and the program is part network-building, part training of leadership and innovation skills nifty to thrive on the job market.

The Innovation Lab is the heart of the program: One of the nine partnering tech giants provides an open task from their R&D department and a cohort of +- 25 stipends has four months (alongside studies) to get to the bottom of it together.

The challenge: The students come from various backgrounds, hardly know each other, live all across Germany / Switzerland and the only reward for the whole effort is the vague promise of an essential learning about how innovation really works.

PEOPLE

The stipends are always eager to start right away with the challenge, but I arrange several formats, so that they first get to know each other as individuals, and share their strengths, motivations and vulnerabilities reciprocally. Only once a trust baseline is established, we co-create working groups within the team.

INNOVATION

After we met with the case contributor, we take time to deconstruct and reconstruct the given challenge. Depending on the ask, I share R&D frameworks like Design Thinking or Lean Start-up, acquaint them with innovation jargon and demonstrate tools like Job-To-Be-Done. And: given their diverse backgrounds, I make space for peer-to-peer learning to harvest what is already in the room.

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

I start on a meta-level and describe how project management and the degree of innovation are linked. We then gradually descend through the innovator’s mindset, agile vs water-fall and ultimately decide on processes and software tools to plan and execute the project.

COLLABORATION

Throughout the week, I establish rituals like check-ins and -outs, the introduction of the Fail Award, and substituting big discussion rounds with simultaneous content-creation or distributed dialogues. Before the week ends, I share a few more concepts to foster harmonious cooperation such as non-violent communication and promote the creation of a Team Playbook.

There is usually an interim presentation to the case contributor. Around that time, I coach the stipends on how to present work-in-progress and getting productive feedback. Again depending on the challenge, I share methods and tools for ideation, prototyping, setting up experiments or business modelling for the next project phase. And I support them in setting up their first retrospective, and help resolve conflicts if necessary.

Close to the end of the project, I provide guidance on creating a great slideshow and pitching like a pro.

We then conclude with a longer retrospective to harvest individual and collective lessons learnt, give each other appreciative feedback and think of ways how to continue to grow together after the project is concluded.