Problem

The challenge giver of this challenge was the Theatergemeinde München (“TheaGe”), who we had worked with on a previous challenge. The TheaGe is a non-profit organization that acts as a cultural mediator and that facilitates the access to various cultural offerings in Munich for its members. Unfortunately, the TheaGe had to deal with a constant decrease in membership numbers over the past decades due to an over-aging of its members. The challenge hence was to develop a solution that would take the established business model of the TheaGe into the digital area to attract a new, younger audience. This audience should then be convinced to become new members.

Currently, young, culturally interested people are mostly using the Internet to look for suitable events. This search, however, often turns into a challenge since there is an oversupply of offers that is often presented in an unstructured way. The student team that had the aim to improve this situation therefore stated the problem as follows: "These days, culturally interested intellectual best agers around Munich are looking for like-minded people and for information about the cultural scene but instead often fail to get a proper overview due to an overflow of information."

Approach

Despite the well-established and appreciated business model of the TheaGe, the organization has to deal with a decreasing number of memberships due to an over-aging of its members. Subsequently, the TheaGe has to find new ways to attract more digital affine members. In addition, these should tackle the problem of information overload and disorder when culturally interested people research activities online.

The solution statement therefore was formulated as follows: "We create a platform to strengthen the community feeling and to offer online features to a new, digital audience that facilitate the navigation of the diverse cultural landscape in Munich."

Consequently, the solution that the student team suggested for both outlined problems was an all-in-one digital community platform, that focuses on offering the highly valued services of the TheaGe (early ticket access, discounts, and personal consultation) and creates a community feeling (with social exchange, a forum, blogs & meet-ups) at the same time. To come up with this solution, the students used the Design Thinking methodology.

First, they worked on answering the five questions of Amazon's innovation method "Working Backwards". Then they applied the Scrum methodology. The student team consisted of nine students from Munich University of Applied Science (MUAS) and the University of Tampere (TAMK). The proposed and subsequently developed solution was displayed in a storyboard, too. The links to the created documents can be found at the end of this article.

Innovation in Action

The prototype is a digital platform, developed on Angular with Amplify, that displays the variety of offers that the TheaGe has for its members. This includes a section on upcoming and recommended events, which are stored in a database using dynamo DB and where an API could be integrated for direct ticket sales, a blog, where members are informed about the most recent news, insights and behind the scenes information, and a forum, where members can interact and communicate with each other in various categories and sub-categories. Additionally, platform standard features such as an informative “About Us” page, a categorized FAQ section and the opportunity to directly contact the TheaGe via various channels were created. Each user can now create a personal profile, too.

The prototype allows to create user profiles and to add new users who officially signed up to become a TheaGe member. In the future, members will also be able to manage their preferences in their profile for more personalized event and content recommendations. In addition, an Admin profile is available that includes special rights to manage, add, and remove content or users on the platform and the possibility to moderate the forum and act as a cultural mediator.

The platform was built using Amazon Web Services.