ROCKWOOL Foundation Intervention Unit
The Danish public faces a wicked problem which haven’t seen major improvements in many years. Around a fifth of every youth generation doesn’t achieve secondary education thus impacting their opportunities of succeeding in life. The Intervention Unit under the ROCKWOOL Foundation set out to scope a range of possible interventions that would have the potential to “unlock” the system and create innovation on a systemic scale. As part of the scoping project we delivered deep human insights into and with the target group. Those young people that it’s all about and for whom we want to create a positive change.
The time and road to impact from qualitative insights might now always be linear or even apparent when setting of to innovate. To support the ROCKWOOL Foundation in creating systemic innovation we insisted on creating and sustaining deep empathy for the target group by bringing the target group into the project on a continuous basis.
Methodologically we went a long way to work on the premise of the young people we encountered. We gave them an arena for voicing their individual experiences from the educational system through rap songs, art projects, video films and the like. The result was stories that stuck with the project group even when going into abstract discussion about what might be the future of secondary education in Denmark.
