our history
In 2002, Dr. Carl Kuttler, former President of St. Petersburg College, first conceived Collaborative Labs when he participated in a collaborative visioning meeting with fifty community college presidents. He was exhilarated and inspired by the accelerated strategic visioning process he experienced in eight hours in Orlando, Florida. This one-day engagement resulted in a shared vision for the future of community colleges, and was illustrated in a dynamic vision mural and captured in a robust real-time record.
The Collaborative Labs at St. Petersburg College opened their unparalleled innovation space for business in 2004, and his vision to offer an accelerated strategic visioning process to Tampa Bay was realized .
Who we are:
The Collaborative Labs team is diverse in our education and experience, which lends to a comprehensive understanding of what our clients experience and what their needs are. Collectively, we have worked in private sector, non-profit, government, and education. We have varied areas of expertise in training, engineering, technology, business management and information systems, marketing, healthcare, organizational development, project management, event planning, policy and procedure documentation and development, technical and graphic design, and so much more!
We love connecting to our clients and learning about their incredible businesses and organizations. The Collaborative Labs team tends to become very attached to their mission and vision as if it was our own!
What we do:
Collaborative Labs at St. Petersburg College specializes in the design, facilitation, and documentation of highly-interactive and dynamic collaborative engagements. Our process enables maximum participation to identify areas of consensus on a shared strategic vision and priorities. Collaborative technology such as digital whiteboards, visioning and brainstorming software, and individual polling devices accelerate participants’ best thinking. Real-time documentation captures the input of collaborative engagements in a meaningful and comprehensive way. We complete and forward the Real Time Record to all participants within 48 to 72 hours, so implementation can begin immediately and momentum stays intact. A business illustrator creates engaging visual illustrations, which detail participants’ shared vision and priorities.
The objectives of our facilitated, collaborative engagements are to help organizations:
• Increase their understanding of the importance of planning, prioritization, visioning, and consensus-building
• Increase their ability to implement and track specific strategic and tactical priorities and accomplishments
• Increase morale and organizational buy-in resulting from plan creation and implementation
• Increase their ability to articulate organizational value and brand
Thousands of participants have benefited from the unique, collaborative process since 2004. We custom design each engagement to ensure that organizations emerge with a solid road map for the future. Every collaborative lab includes interactive team activities where participants are assigned to multiple cross-functional teams throughout the day. Key learning around focused objectives takes place within small team discussions, large group debriefs, and facilitated presentations. The collaboration is “pure” in the sense that teams focus on meeting organizational goals, rather than “simulated team building activities” that are often difficult to link to real organizational objectives. Our process ensures that every participant has an equal voice, as well as the expectation for accountability to achieve the goals they help define. Participants have a vested interest in the shared vision and actionable plan, which mobilizes organizational change.
The Collaborative Labs Team serves as extended strategic partners and coaches for each organization in the planning process, in the facilitated engagement, and in the most difficult part of the process, the implementation plan.
The Collaborative Labs works with all entities, including non-profit, private-sector, government, and municipalities. We also partner and engage the community to affect the overall well-being of the communities in which our clients serve. Our innovative Labs are located in Clearwater, Florida, and we work mostly in the Tampa Bay area and Florida. We also have hybrid, virtual, and mobile services available and have worked with clients all over the world!