Innovation without boundaries – facilitating collaboration across countries

03 Feb 2025 4min read
Team Consulting logo: Award-winning medical device consultancy specializing in medical technology design and development. 39 years of experience.

Team Discussion

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Siemens Healthineers and Team Consulting wanted to come together to collate our thoughts around the shift of healthcare into communities and homes. As healthcare systems face increasing pressures and new technologies emerge, we are seeing some areas of healthcare transition from traditional hospital settings to community and home-based care. Exploring this challenge and the drivers behind it, as well as observing how the industry is responding, made us think about the potential for future evolution and the wins that could be achieved. What else is possible and what more can be done?

We have organised a hybrid, collaborative workshop, spanning two different countries connected via video calls with some of the best minds in the business, both seasoned professionals from Team Consulting as well as Siemens Healthineers, who are shaping the future of healthcare. We wanted to come together with sustainability in mind – the question is, can a video workshop be as productive as an in-person meeting? With the right tools, preparation and facilitator, we can create a supportive environment that fosters collaboration and thought leadership without being in the same room, or the same country!

Accepting the challenge of leading this workshop is Charlotte Harris, Team Consulting’s Head of Front End Innovation.

Charlotte has crafted a variety of methods and tools to ‘connect the brains’ of workshop participants, through creating enriching environments, enabling collaboration, challenging assumptions and facilitating effective discussions and decision making across a diverse range of situations. With the growing emphasis on minimising environmental impact, Charlotte’s ability to cultivate collaboration without the need for travel has become invaluable to clients and she’s shared a few of the tools she’ll be using during the session below:

Shifting healthcare to communities and homes workshop with Siemens and Team Consulting

Tool 1: Miro

Miro is a virtual whiteboard tool with a lot of great features for interacting remotely. Not only can multiple people add to and collaborate on the platform remotely, there are also handy templates and lots of tools to aid collaboration, decision-making and ideation, such as mind-mapping, voting tools, presentation modes and timers.

For remote and hybrid workshops, we find Miro to be an essential collaboration tool.

Tool 2: Mind-mapping

When exploring topics and capturing thoughts and collaborative discussions, mind-mapping is a great tool for organising information. A map is created around a single main topic in the centre of a page, to which associated ideas (images or words) are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central topic, and other ideas branch out from those.

Mind maps can be drawn by hand or in mind-mapping software, and can be a great visual depiction of ideas coming together.

Tool 3: Analogous industries

Analogous industries consider the application of innovations, techniques, tools and processes. in industries outside of the one in which we are focused. For example, we may be looking to innovate in healthcare, but what trends and innovations could we apply to our industry from other successes? By using imagery and objects to represent a range of industries, we can prompt people to consider innovations which could transfer cross industry into their own, which is a useful brainstorming technique to encourage thinking outside the target industry.

We’re looking forward to a very productive 3.5 hour session in a few days’ time, and to share the outcomes of the workshop.

At Team Consulting, improving people’s lives is at the core of what we do. We are thrilled to be partnering with Siemens Healthineers, whose goal is to “pioneer breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere. Sustainably”

We’re excited about the potential ideas we’ll generate together, and we’ll share them as soon as possible to help our industry.

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