Collaborative design projects in Latin America between academy and industry, have been commonly focused on New Product Development processes. Nevertheless, collaborative experiences at the Fuzzy Front End (FFE) stage are more frequent between company partners to emphasize the potential for organizations to collaborate, rather than academy and industry. This paper presents the experience in the set-up and execution of an international project, so-called “First View DesignLab” organized between Universidad EAFIT and TUDelft to be executed in Colombia with five local companies in collaboration with Product Design Engineering (PDE) students. Each company proposed a company case where the objective was to find new opportunities for new product/service concepts. Design Thinking (DT) tools were used to trigger co-creation and open innovation in order to explore new opportunities by each company. Important aspects have been of great value to identify best
practices to better develop academic collaborative projects at the FFE. Reflections are presented as useful insights to enhance innovation capabilities and idea generation skills for both, academy and industry to identify opportunities.