At this year’s annual end-of-year collab meeting in Hamburg, we took a closer look at what we have learned in 2024 by bringing together our local groups with an open invite to other community members, a few selected speakers and created a curated packed afternoon with a dozen lightning talks.
Attending this year was a bigger crowd than past years — a diverse set of digital leaders from large, complex and global organisations like Canyon, Jungheinrich, Lufthansa, OTTO alongside agencies such as Diconium and Thoughtworks as well as software firms like CoreMedia, Magnolia, Staffbase and a few other friends from near and far.
Employee communication platform software firm Haiilo hosted us in their charming offices, which was a fitting scene for learning and networking.
Read moreIt's tricky to find talented new colleagues and building the right culture takes much more than just academic qualifications.
Jan Zerkowski is Innovation & Design Partner at Roche in Basel, Switzerland and he was recently a guest star in one of our Future Workplace peer groups. In the session, he mentioned the idea of hiring using 'creative CVs', where you highlight life skills, like film making, music, or like me elite running and learning quite a bit from working in a supermarket.
In a recent member conference call, Jan elaborated on the idea and he shared how he encourages different applicants and what he looks for in CV’s.
Read more“To build your innovation muscle you need motivation, practice and success”
When I recently spoke to Michael Bednar-Brandt, he made innovation initiatives sound quite a bit like practising for a marathon. Or rather, he made it crystal clear how innovation programs can easily fail if they are not treated more like a corporate fitness program instead of an innovation magic pill.
Michael works as Business Innovation expert at Oracle. Based out of Vienna, Austria, he has over 20 years of experience with innovation programs at both startups and large corporations and is a self-proclaimed corporate innovation demystifier. He is also our expert of the month.
Read moreInnovation rarely happens alone and many innovators are involved in various clusters and innovation partnerships, but what are really cluster business models, how can we design better ones and how does it help us accelerate innovation?
Victor Haze is International Ecosystem Director at Health Valley in the Netherlands and has recently co-authored an extensive report (220 pages!) on the topic of cluster business models and how it creates value impact.
In a recent member conference call, he gave us the inside story on how he has been exploring current practices of cluster business model development and developing a robust strategy toolkit to develop better cluster strategy and cluster business models.
Below are my brief notes from the call. Thanks to Victor for such a monumental contribution to the global community on cluster business models. It’s clear that Victor is kickstarting a wave of cluster business model innovation projects and ideas around the world. As we’ve said for a decade: Sharing is caring!
Read moreWhile the pandemic has hit each industry and country differently, few are more hit than those relying on tourism. In particular those in destinations further away than a drive or train ride.
For our final member call in 2020, we looked to the home country of Santa Claus and heard from Stine Selmer Andersen at Visit Greenland.
Using her work with destination development and sustainability, Stine Selmer Andersen dived into the new reality and trends of tourism and gave a behind-the-scenes look into what you do, when you drive tourism to a country, which is practically impossible for foreigners to visit.
In other words, a different angle on customer experience, digital business development and the new normal.
Read moreWe still have a long way to go when it comes to diversity and inclusion and this has deep impact on corporate innovation as well.
In a recent member conference call with Nicolas Bry from Orange in Paris, we covered rapid innovation inside large organisations, specifically the term intrapreneurship - the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization.
While there are a vast majority of documented intrapreneurship cases by men, in Nicolas Bry’s experience, there are as many active female intrapreneurs as male. One of the reasons he cited, was that it’s less risky compared to start-ups and usual entrepreneurship, as you still have corporate security in intrapreneurship programs.
Read moreCan you create needs?
What is an experience?
Michael Bednar-Brandt from Oracle asked these and other relevant questions as he took Boye 19 Aarhus conference participants on a journey to untangle the experience economy.
In his highly engaging and entertaining keynote, he offered an answer which in brief was a recipe…
Read moreWe worked closely with one museum, who continuously chose their lowest performing type of exhibition to be set up again. I think they were perhaps too passionate and too close to the project. It’s not really surprising that we see this in the art and culture industry, but I know that this challenge goes beyond our industry.
Read moreMy approach is based around creating disturbance in order to destabilize habits and comfort zones: the enemies of change (as I see it). Outside of habits and comfort zones is fertile ground, but there may also be fear and suffering. There can be no guarantees that stepping into fertile ground will yield resilience, but it’s more likely to get results than doing nothing. The trick is to stretch the comfort zone, by inviting reflection and growth, in small steps.
Read moreEveryone is talking innovation, collaboration, intra/entrepreneurialism, agility, decentralisation of power, digitalisation, the VUCA world, but all to few realize the sort of changes we will have to make to achieve it.
Read moreHow often do standard change methods result in actual, deep rooted and lasting change?
According to the Gartner: 50% of change efforts are clear failures, 16% have mixed results and only the remainder are somewhat successful. If we want to create real, sustainable change, then top down classical methods for change may not work.
Read moreDeveloping Personal Resilience is not something that can be demanded and argued for through logic and reasoning. It is a change movement of profound personal impact.
Asking your colleagues to become resilient and then telling them why they should do it, is not going to cut it. Something else is required.
Read moreWhile in Washington DC to moderate a meeting in the CMS Expert Group, I had a longer conversation with our member Shawn Moore from software vendor Solodev. We spoke about tech trends, recent developments and how some of the big problems in the industry remain unsolved.
Read moreDenmark was a hot topic in the US primary elections earlier this year. In passing it was mentioned as a place Donald Trump would be likely to nuke. Bernie Sanders also showered it with attention, proclaiming it as a society Americans should aspire to. And as always Fox News saw it all quite differently. No surprise there.
Read moreA recent study by Viacom Media Networks shows 71% of Millennials said they’d rather visit the dentist than hear what a bank has to say.
If you couple this with the fact that transactions performed at physical bank branches are on the down, and in many countries bank branches are closing, it is clear that what we know as banking is in for a wild ride over the coming years.
Read more