Every story has a first chapter. Ours was written in May 2005 in Bangkok, a few months before Thinkergy was formally incorporated, with Merck Thailand, the Thai arm of the Darmstadt-based pharmaceutical and chemical company Merck. Its Chairman and Managing Director, Mr. Heinz Landau, believed that sustainable leadership and regular CSR activities drive both profitable growth and employee engagement. He asked Thinkergy’s founder, Dr. D, to train his managers and employees in a structured creative process method. And he wanted them to work on something real, not a textbook case.

But a real business case brings real pressure, and pressure tends to crowd out learning. So we agreed on a middle path: a real case, but a neutral one, taken from Merck’s CSR partnership with the Raks Thai Foundation, the Thai successor to CARE International, which strengthens poor and disadvantaged communities across Thailand. We framed the initial challenge widely: How to raise employee engagement for CSR activities in Merck Thailand? In other words, this was half training and half project, an early hybrid of both.

Over two days, 30 delegates in three teams of ten worked through the creative process. The morning of day 2 was a firestorm of ideation: ten ideation stations, anything goes, wild ideas welcome, and idea quantity above all. Then, in the early afternoon, came something the classic four-step creative problem-solving process of the day didn’t have. Dr. D called it Ideation 2. First, the delegates walked the room on a discovery hunt for the most intriguing of the morning’s raw ideas, in a mood of intrigue and mystery. Then the room grew calm and focused as the teams turned their finds into well-designed concepts. Standing at the side and watching, Dr. D sensed that this had a kind of magic. Its energy was entirely different from the frantic morning, and it worked. Interestingly, that humble “Ideation 2” later grew into the Development stage, the D in X-IDEA and our innovation method’s distinguishing step. X-IDEA was in the room before it even had a name.

One idea from the workshop took root, literally. Merck Thailand organized a joint tree-planting day that brought together its staff, lead customers, local shareholders, and CSR partners such as Raks Thai, later activated with the help of another NGO, the Plant A Tree Today (PATT) Foundation. Ultimately, everyone won: Merck gained more engaged employees, its NGO partners gained fresh ideas for free, and the team that would become Thinkergy gained its very first client, along with the seed of its signature method.

Are you planning a creativity or innovation training, and want your people to work on something meaningful, without the stress of a live business challenge? Contact us to find out how X-IDEA may help you turn a CSR or social innovation challenge into a learning case, so that your teams build creative confidence while your community partners gain fresh ideas.