Innovation campus format for cross-functional sprints
Breaking the silos between newsroom, product, and technology
About
DER SPIEGEL is one of Europe's most influential investigative news organisations — founded in 1947, around 700,000 weekly readers, and employee-owned since 1974, a structure that makes editorial independence sacred. That same structure — distributed ownership, protected editorial processes, siloed disciplines — can also become organisational drag as a newsroom shifts to digital.
Challenge
As digital demanded cross-functional speed, innovation at DER SPIEGEL was trapped in departmental fiefdoms: investigative teams worked privately and cautiously, product sat in its own silo, and technology couldn't move as fast as the market. The organisation had the talent, mandate and mission — it lacked the connective tissue to move together, without imposing a top-down alignment that would fracture the culture.
Solution
Designed and facilitated an innovation campus format — less a one-off workshop, more a working space where editorial, product and technology teams worked on real SPIEGEL challenges alongside each other. Built trust through transparency, so investigative teams could see how product decisions protected their independence and engineers stopped being gatekeepers, and used design thinking and rapid prototyping to make the silos visible as a shared problem rather than a blame game.
Outcome
What followed is confidential — but the silos the work was built to break are the ones the organisation has since moved to dismantle, merging its video, audio and social teams into a single cross-media unit.
He didn't tell them to collaborate — he made it impossible not to: when the newsroom can see the product roadmap, work stops waiting for permission.
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