• INNOVATION
• Design Thinking
• futures thinking

End-to-End Innovation Bootcamp for Coventry Building Society’s Innovation Team

Experience Haus worked with the Innovation team at Coventry Building Society in London to design, build and deliver a practical, end-to-end innovation bootcamp, equipping participants with the tools, methods and mindset to take ideas from initial problem framing all the way through to prototyping and storytelling.

THE TASK

Coventry Building Society’s innovation team wanted to build genuine end-to-end capability in design thinking and innovation practice — not just a surface-level introduction, but a deep, applied understanding of how to move from problem to concept to prototype. The team needed to develop shared methods and ways of working, with the confidence to run their own innovation workshops internally going forward. Experience Haus was engaged to design and deliver a bespoke bootcamp that was grounded in real challenges, deliberately hands-on, and structured to build both hard skills — user research, ideation, prototyping, service design — and the softer skills that make innovation stick: facilitation, co-creation, and storytelling.

ACTIONS

Experience Haus designed and delivered a five-day immersive bootcamp for approximately six members of the CBS innovation team, with a follow-up day to consolidate outputs and extend into service design and Figma workflows. Each day was built around a live design challenge, ensuring that every technique introduced was immediately practised rather than simply observed. The programme spanned the full arc of the design and innovation process:

• Days one and two focused on building empathy, conducting user research, developing personas, mapping customer journeys, and exploring the psychological underpinnings of behaviour and decision-making
• Day two also introduced strategic innovation frameworks — including the Doblin Innovation Framework, Three Horizons, Blue Ocean Strategy, PESTLE Analysis, and value proposition development — to ground the team in how to identify and evaluate opportunities
• Day three moved into ideation and future visioning, using techniques including Worst Possible Idea, Six Thinking Hats, and Provocations, before moving into scenario planning and storyboarding
• Days four and five shifted into rapid prototyping — concept sketching, no-code and low-code tools, generative AI applications, usability testing, and UX design principles — culminating in team playbacks and a workshop retrospective
• The follow-up day brought everything into form with Figma, covering service design blueprinting, future state journey mapping, storytelling and narrative arcs, design systems, and designer-to-developer workflows

Throughout, the approach emphasised A3 paper, post-it notes and sketching before introducing digital tools — ensuring participants built intuition for the methods themselves, not just the software that supports them.

THE OUTCOME

By the end of the bootcamp, the CBS innovation team had navigated the entire design and product development process through a live challenge, gaining direct experience with every stage. Beyond the skills themselves, participants left with a reusable toolkit built specifically for their ongoing work. Key outcomes included:

• A shared methodology and language for running innovation processes across the team
• Hands-on experience with over 20 design and innovation techniques, applied to a real organisational challenge
• A bespoke facilitation toolkit including completed Personas, Empathy Maps, Customer Journey Maps, a Service Blueprint, and a Value Proposition Canvas
• Capability to independently plan and facilitate innovation workshops, including remote formats, with practical guidance on agenda-setting, icebreakers, and exercises
• Confidence in prototyping and communicating concepts, from low-fidelity sketches through to Figma-based service narratives

WORKSHOP PARTICIPANT

The bootcamp gave us a genuine end-to-end experience of the innovation process, working through real challenges rather than hypotheticals. We came away with practical techniques we could use immediately, and a toolkit that will shape how we run our own workshops for a long time to come.