Finalist
Building Team Knowledge: ‘Escaping’ Convention
Summary of work
Research has demonstrated that simply enjoying an activity can increase the likelihood of the information being remembered, based on dopamine release. Furthermore, when an activity is novel and involves reward anticipation, that dopamine can help to commit the learnings to long-term memory.
Otsuka Pharmaceuticals UK needed an educational activity to close the branded commercial launch day at its internal conference, with the objective for everyone from Medical to Finance to consolidate learnings from the day, ahead of a year dedicated to asset launches. The activity needed to be creative, memorable and engaging to help ensure those learnings were retained.
An educational escape room format provided the ideal combination of innovation and creativity, alongside healthy competition and award anticipation. Sequential rounds focused on key points of the patient journey in lupus nephritis (LN), with the teams’ goal to build a giant branded jigsaw puzzle by completing all rounds successfully and quickly.
A month after the meeting, 65% of survey respondents could recall ‘everything’ or ‘nearly everything’ they learned from the escape room about the burden of disease and 82% felt ‘strongly’ or ‘somewhat strongly’ that the escape room format helped them remember the facts about LN.
Judges’ comments
Langland and Otsuka Pharmaceuticals UK have designed a well thought out event with ambitious goals. The analysis, strategy and objectives were all clear and the activity clearly engaged the company’s internal stakeholders. The judges were impressed by how the team delivered great outcomes with a modest budget and thought the positive responses were highly encouraging.
