Category Archives: Lessons Learned

innovation, Lessons Learned, Rants

Talking about corporate innovation and the pandemic

Recently I was on Fabian Böck‘s BOECKBX podcast and talked a bit about corporate innovation and the effects of the pandemic on businesses – including my own.

Have a look and listen.

TL;DR

Based on my own experience working in outsourced innovation with governments, organisations and some of the largest companies in the world on and off between 1996 and 2010, I do not think it is a good idea to outsource (business model) innovation.

That’s the whole premise of my company, +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES.

From the +ANDERSEN mission statement:

“… we enable companies to manage and run innovation for tomorrow inside their own company, using their own people today.

Because innovation in your company will never happen by outside consultants.

It has to come from your most valuable assets – the people you already have on the inside.”

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corporate entrepreneurship, innovation, Lessons Learned

An update from +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES

As some of you might know, I also run a company called +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES on the side. We help medium and large companies and organisations around the world get serious about innovation and delivering actual results instead of PowerPoints.

I thought I’d take a couple of minutes to update you on how we’ve been adapting to better meet your needs in these trying times.

tl;dr – We now offer all our programs and services also via remote (in the best possible quality available today) as an option for you.

Whether you’re back in the regular office or still working remotely from home, we’re providing you with our popular programs like directly to you in the conferencing tools you already use, in the quality you’ve come to expect.

Everything you’re seeing in this video is taken directly from our streaming studio. This is how it actually looks in your normal conferencing app.

And for the highest quality possible over the Internet today, we also offer a completely new direct point to point streaming solution – in full HD, with no dropped frames, no screen freeze, and no audio issues.

Also, by popular demand we’re now offering moderation and management of internal and public online events for those of you looking for quality outsourced alternatives.

For those of you who are new to remote working and online collaboration, have no fear, we of course offer you training, both for your managers and for all of the program participants in advance.

Thank you for your time, stay safe.

Vidar 

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entrepreneurship, Lessons Learned, startup

On Location Based Services

Painted in Waterlogue

Writing on the Wall: A Business Model Canvas, complete with festively colored Post-Its, Atherton, CA June 2013.

This post has been gather digital dust in private draft form since May 2013. I thought I’d finally publish it to share with anyone interested in location based services.

Preamble

In what now seems like eons ago, I founded a location based tech startup called “Gauss — The People Magnet”. It took me on a roller-coaster ride around the world — from the front page of The New York Times to near personal bankruptcy in the course of about two years. It folded before we got somewhere significant. If you’re interested in the background for founding ‘Gauss — The People Magnet’, there are a couple of old posts for that.

Gauss was an iPhone app to help you discover who’s nearby and what you have in common; To discover the hidden connections to the people around you in real-time – and out of necessity at the time – a self-made cloud backend that did a lot of magic for that to actually work.

To its users, it was a People Magnet for their pocket.

In this post I’m completely cleaning out the closet with my thoughts and experiences related to that startup, including potential revenue sources and business models. It’s a long and winding read — a very mixed bag, assembled from scattered notes.

Caveat Emptor in 2016: If any of this looks familiar or straight forward today, rest assured they weren’t when we started out back in early 2011. To wit: successful monetization of non-dating social discovery apps arguably still hasn’t happened yet.

tl;dr

I know this is a long and bumpy read, so here’s the short version:
Continue reading →

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