Category Archives: corporate entrepreneurship

corporate entrepreneurship, Events, innovation, startup

Speaking at the pre-opening of the digital HUB Cologne

What Startups Need @ digital HUB Cologne


Recently I was honored to be invited to speak at the members-only pre-opening of the digital HUB Cologne about “What Startups Need”.

Spoiler alert: It isn’t corporate partners and digital hubs.

The digital hubs in the state of NRW in Germany is a political construct part financed with public money. It’s supposed to support and help small and medium companies get onboard with “digitalisation”, whatever that term means.

The ensuing panel debate and Q&A

As you might know, I’m much more of a libertarian than a socialist, so I’m not the biggest fan of this publicly funded hub concept for a number of reasons.

Some are:

  • I don’t believe taxpayers should be subsidising private enterprises
  • If the market had wanted or needed a “digital hub”, it would have created one already by itself
  • The market is Darwinistic and self- correcting – putting public support-wheels or bandaids on failing businesses is wrong
  • Creating publicly funded competition to existing local business offerings is wrong

You get the drift.

In sum, I think it’s a political innovation theatre paid for in part by us the taxpayers.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

These were the slides I used:

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corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, Lean Startup, speaking

Why Corporates Engage with Startups @ Henkel

Henkel HQ, Düsseldorf

Recently I was invited by Henkel to keynote at “Henkel Startup-Day”, an internal innovation event at their HQ with +300 participants about why and how corporations engage with startups (and sometimes vice versa).

A participant describing my Keynote:

[…] Vidar Andersen, asked us to talk to a person we don’t know at all. A fairly easy task: I turned to the left and talked to a guy that was doing a dual course of studies with Henkel. At that moment he was writing about collaboration between companies and startups. Stunning, his enthusiasm and concentration paying attention to every single detail that was said. Andersen made one point clear that big companies have to be faster and adapt flexibly to startups’ pace in order to be successful. He also mentioned a splendid quote from Claus Schwab: “In the new world, it’s not the big fish that eats the small fish. It’s the fast fish that eats the slow fish”. With his funny sayings he made the audience laugh their ass off.  – Amina Mrad on Medium

These these were the slides I used:

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corporate entrepreneurship, Weird

Corporate Innovation – On Onassis’ Yacht

On a boat…

Who says corporate innovation has to be boring?

The office today… A yacht previously owned by Onassis.

I don’t often post about what we do with +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES for corporations and their innovation programs, because they don’t hire us for me to have yet another stage to talk about myself.

But from time to time I make an exception. This is one of those times.

Today, the office for the regular support and feedback session with the innovation teams of a Dutch corporate customer was a bit different.

It was on a yacht. And not any old yacht. A yacht previously owned by Onassis.

You might know I’m a huge opponent of running a corporate innovation theatre, so why a yacht as an office?

First of all, it’s important to get the innovation teams off-site, as far away from the long arm of daily operations for these kinds of sessions. (And as an added bonus, if you chose somewhere nice, it doesn’t hurt the inspiration of the teams.)

Secondly, we’re darn frugal. It was cheaper to rent the yacht than renting a off-site conference facility for the same day. Incredible!

The captain explaining the technology capabilities of the conference room…

 

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corporate entrepreneurship, Customer Development, Education, entrepreneurship, innovation, startup

Introducing +Andersen & Associates

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People have been asking me what I’ve been up to in the last year and short answer is: I’ve been busy.

On the one hand busy supporting and nurturing the locals startup scene of Cologne grow and and teaching university students how to make their own mistakes instead of repeating my own mistakes when building a startup.

On the other hand, as a consequence of my experience with founding startups, working with corporations and teaching how to apply the scientific method to building startups at universities,   I’ve been receiving a lot of questions from my old corporate contacts. They’ve been asking me what they can learn from startups and which methodologies and processes they can use in their organization to create more innovation.  And the demand just kept on growing, so much so that I had to founded a new company to be able to serve the them.

Introducing +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES

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