ignore gravity wants your next big idea to survive the workshop

A saucepan is an unusually persuasive prop in a management consulting story. In photographs of ignore gravity’s Lab56 project for Jägermeister, people work around a kitchen crowded with ingredients, utensils and bottles. The assignment was to develop beverage ideas from the company’s knowledge of herbs. Chefs, bartenders, food-tech specialists and creatives helped make those ideas tangible. Someone eventually had to put something in the pot.

That scene gives the Berlin firm’s otherwise expansive vocabulary a useful anchor. Cultural transformation, entrepreneurial collaboration, leadership development: these can be slippery purchases. A prototype can be examined. A participant can pitch to a board. A founder can test an offer with a customer. Across its portfolio, ignore gravity keeps arranging situations in which an abstract ambition meets somebody capable of doing something about it.

The company sits between organizational consulting, executive education and startup program design. Its customers include established businesses with routines to reconsider and founders still deciding which routines to build. The question connecting them is practical: how do you give an unfamiliar idea a fair trial?

The kitchen has a selection process

For Lab56, ignore gravity describes a sequence that moved from company and specialist input to idea sprints, consumer feedback and rapid prototyping. More than 150 ideas became ten concepts; eight prototypes reached Jägermeister’s management. The decision awaiting those prototypes was evaluation and prioritization for further development.

The most useful part of that sequence is the narrowing. Each stage asks for a different kind of commitment. Generating an idea is cheap in effort compared with equipping a lab, making a sample or deciding whether to develop it further. The funnel gives those commitments an order. A manager copying the exercise should pay at least as much attention to the review points as to the brainstorm.

Give the idea an audience with authority

At energy company EWE, the unit of experimentation was the employee. ignore gravity designed and delivered a month-long intrapreneurship bootcamp for 30 people, combining lean methods, idea sprints and entrepreneurial tools. Its account reports more than 200 approaches and business models, followed by pitches to board members and leadership teams.

The proposed route beyond the pitch is revealing. A new business could potentially become a company backed through an investment vehicle, with the employee who originated the idea serving as managing director for a year. That was a possible development path, rather than evidence that every pitch became a venture.

Read together, these projects suggest a useful buying criterion: ask where authority enters the program. A workshop can help people make a case, but somebody must be able to authorize the next experiment. Without that connection, even an energetic month risks becoming a very elaborate suggestion box.

Eight principles need more than a poster

The Daimler assignment addressed a different distance: the gap between a leadership principle and a working habit. The carmaker’s Leadership 2020 initiative established eight principles as it prepared for changes in mobility. ignore gravity joined the rollout, helping develop a digital learning application, an implementation strategy and a communication plan.

The case study framed the challenge around 30,000 managers and 270,000 employees. Those figures describe the audience the initiative needed to address. The application organized learning around individual principles, using tutorials, cases and exercises to make them usable.

This is a less photogenic piece of work than the kitchen, and arguably a more recognizable corporate problem. Agreeing on language does not automatically tell a supervisor what to do during a difficult conversation. The practical value of a learning tool lies in helping people rehearse a response, consider an example and return to it when the situation appears at work.

Otto Group’s executive development program supplied another route from reflection to public action. ignore gravity co-designed and delivered a 12-day experience involving encounters with startups, founders and other corporate leaders. Participants finished by preparing talks, curated with Tim Leberecht, for an audience of Otto employees. The audience matters: people who will see a leader back at work have a different interest from fellow course participants.

The people behind the unusual guest list

Founded in 2011, ignore gravity describes itself as a community drawn to the intersection of business, technology, society, arts and culture. Its public team roster mixes partners and project managers with associated freelancers and specialists. That composition helps explain a portfolio in which the participants may be executives one week and food innovators the next.

Jan Bathel, identified by the company as founder and managing director, works on accelerators, executive coaching and cultural transformation. The Empathic Organization initiative adds another strand: leadership work that connects empathy and personal awareness with the task of leading others. Its retreat team includes partner Susanne Scheerer and facilitator Erik Winter, whose work incorporates embodied awareness.

The firm also experiments with the mechanics of gathering people. For She’s Mercedes, it developed a Silent Innovation Lab using headphones for short lectures and participatory learning at a women entrepreneurs’ association meeting. A companion toolbox extended the material beyond the event. The format makes a small but useful point: the way people encounter an idea is part of the design.

Grace starts before the pitch

With Grace, ignore gravity applied its program-building approach to women’s entrepreneurship. Its account of the initiative describes interviews with successful women founders that highlighted three obstacles: too few visible role models, discouragement from the surrounding social environment and the need for practical knowledge. Founder camps and meetups followed.

That is the clearest documented example here of research informing the offer. The proposed response included people to learn from and peers to build alongside. For someone designing a training program, the transferable move is to investigate what prevents participation before deciding which lessons to teach.

Berlin Partner’s 2022 annual report provides a specific snapshot: the Grace Summer Accelerator supported 19 aspiring or existing women founders working on 15 ideas in fields including health, femtech, sustainability and social impact. The number describes a cohort and its work in development and testing. It is a more useful picture than a vague promise to support entrepreneurship.

“It saved me at least 6 months of work.”

Fabiola Munguia, Secfix founder, in a testimonial published by Grace

Grace’s community page now describes a network of more than 200 mentors, including founders, managers, investors and subject specialists. The attraction is access to people who can address a particular problem. Munguia’s estimate is a participant’s experience, rather than a program-wide measurement, but it expresses the value proposition clearly: fewer months spent figuring everything out alone.

The €20,000 offer comes with a calendar

The current Grace Berlin Accelerator advertises an eight-month, full-time program and a stipend of €2,500 gross per month. Across eight months, that is €20,000 per participating founder. It takes no equity, with support funded through the European Social Fund Plus and Berlin. The published application window runs from August 24 to September 22, 2026, for a November start.

The offer has boundaries. Participants must live in Berlin or relocate before starting, and the venture must meet the program’s pre-revenue conditions. Mixed teams face participation rules, and certain previous startup scholarships exclude applicants. For a founder considering it, eligibility and the full-time commitment belong in the first conversation.

Time is also the resource connecting the firm’s corporate and startup work. Someone must make room for employees to experiment or founders to develop a business. The practical question for a buyer is what work participants can defer, who covers their responsibilities and which decisions the program is expected to make possible.

A startup address beyond Berlin

Flämingo extends that thinking into Brandenburg. ignore gravity works with Coconat, DB mindbox and Media Deals on a rural startup hub; the 2026 partner lineup also includes Fraunhofer institutes. The accelerator combines a six-month hybrid growth program with an optional month-long residency for selected startups.

The partners have different jobs to bring to the table. Coconat supplies a setting for working and living together, while the industrial and investor networks make the offer more than a change of scenery. The program targets sectors including mobility, creative industries and health. Participating businesses must already be registered in Brandenburg or be willing to register a company or branch there.

That geographical condition is central to the proposition. Public support is connected to regional economic development. A founder happy to establish a presence there may find the combination attractive; one whose plans require staying elsewhere has a different decision to make.

The market offers choices. Brandenburg’s development agency lists Flämingo alongside programs such as MediaTech Hub Accelerator and Reaktor.Wildau. ignore gravity’s particular appeal lies in connecting founder development with the organizational questions it also addresses inside established companies. Its historical role in developing the sports-tech accelerator leAD adds another example of building a program around a defined community.

Budget for the decision after the workshop

Viewed across these assignments, ignore gravity’s business is designing and delivering consulting engagements and development programs, with entrepreneurship initiatives also supported by sponsors and public funding. The work is valuable when a client needs an experience, a learning process or a community organized around a specific problem.

The projects suggest three things a reader can copy: recruit people with the skills to make the idea, involve the people who can approve its next step and decide what evidence they should review. These are editorial lessons from the cases, not a guarantee of commercial success. They also expose the conditions the approach needs: participant time, relevant expertise and an organization willing to act on what it learns.

Back in the kitchen, the saucepan is still a useful test. A group has moved far enough beyond discussion to make something another person can inspect. The next job belongs to whoever decides whether it deserves another day of work.