Thanks for coming and thanks for inviting me. I will be talking about an initiative that we started at Stevo about two years ago. I'll share some of the findings from that.
I've divided this presentation up into three parts because I know it's very late in the day.
I'll start with a little bit about the challenge we have about how we infuse innovation and a little bit about how you can use this type of working with startups and students for generating marketing, say recruitment and R&D.
Since it's late, I recommend that you take a nap here or here because the middle part is really the exciting part.
Framing this, why this is so important, is just so important.
Ninety-three percent of corporations and the Nordics believe that the digital technologies will disrupt their business within twelve months.
Ninety-one have a digital strategy, great. Twenty-two percent have the right technology and people in place to execute it and only twelve percent have the right people and skills to execute this strategy.
This is by Forrest, a recent report by them.
The challenge is pretty big and it's also big for a company like Stevo.
We have around 1200 employees in three different divisions.
CCI makes software for the editorial world, for newspapers and other media outlets.
Stevo Systems, master data management for retailers and manufacturing and production and so on.
And then we have a printing plant. Obviously, that's where the 1794 heritage comes from.
The Stevo Accelerator is an initiative that spans all three.
I work with projects from all three of these divisions.
We have some pretty significant customers and we've been in this game for a very long time.
Honestly, it sometimes feels a little bit like this. We've been in this business for decades.
We know all there is to know.
Why do people keep talking about disruption?
We are pretty satisfied where we are. We make good money. We still make good money.
But we do need to innovate. We need to look for new directions constantly.
And one of the ways that we did it, it's not the only way, by the way.
I hope this is an inspiration for one of the tools in the toolbox of innovation in maybe your company.
We've launched the Stevo Accelerator.
We had 49 students from seven different academic institutions run through this program.
We ran 22 innovation projects in the past couple of years.
We've helped launch two startups.
I'm pretty proud of the fact that an initiative like this helped create eight new jobs.
Obviously, we hired 50, 100, 200 people in the rest of the organization.
But this little thing also helped launch two startups.
A lot of events, we focus a lot on infusing innovation, inspire our own staff, and it generates a lot of press.
Which I like because I moved from being the marketing manager for one of the divisions for seven years.
So if I failed in that and I'm succeeding now, then I'm perfectly fine with that.
The ground rule for everything we do is actually repeating something that I specifically noted that Matsis mentioned.
Three different layers of innovation.
I call them covers of innovation instead.
Maybe it's because I'm not very academic, so I like covers better than words.
The three colors of innovation is actually fairly easy to explain and it's very important for the rest of my presentation.
If this is the company and we want the company, the ball, to roll in this direction,
we tend to launch, exactly as Matsis said, a lot of our innovation projects in the comfort zone, in the green zone.
Just inside where we're comfortable, where the people who take up this task are pretty sure that they'll get a return on investment on what they do.
Because they will look back on the project and say, did I succeed or did I not succeed?
The next level, and it's perfectly fine by the way, 80 to 90 percent of all new projects are in this realm and that's perfectly fine.
The yellow projects are where we combine existing products, existing services to reach new markets, for example.
So we're still kind of close to our comfort zone.
We work with tools that we feel comfortable with, but we're using them in new ways.
And then the red dots, the red radical innovation dots, that's where we have the what if question.
Like, what if the way I interact with my computer is not a mouse, a touchpad, and a keyboard, but the voice?
What if it was totally normal to wear a Google Glass or some other heads up display?
What if, what if, what if?
We ask the questions about what happens around the next corner where we're not totally comfortable with what goes on.
And all of the Stevo Accelerator projects start with a red dot.
It's extremely important to focus on that what we work on is this, it's not this.
It's okay if it inspires that way, but it starts with a red dot, starts with a red project.
I'm not going to go through the model in detail, but the most important part here is that every single project is done with a partner.
So these students, these 22 projects, not a single of these projects are run for us, for a Stevo division.
We are sharing a curiosity with a partner.
So all the projects come to me, they pick up one of our project proposals,
we make a big deal out of proposing directions, but not forcing the students and startups to work with them, but we connect them with a partner.
An example of this is in the news industry.
We wanted to know, and this is back in the, about six months before the Apple Watch came out,
we wanted to know more about smartwatches, what impact could smartwatches have for news consumers.
So we partnered up with Balance Game.
And with Balance Game, Lisbeth Knudsen herself said we need to think about news distribution in a new way,
and again, this is way before the Apple Watch came out.
So we worked with Anders and some of the other guys from Balance Game, the Grey Storm Hands-on Testing Focus Group workflow, looked into the workflow and so on.
And indeed these two guys, Jonas and Ganesh, who ran the project, talked to Balance Game almost every week about the progress of their research and so on and so on.
They were writing their master thesis, so they had six months of super focused attention on this topic.
We ran a bunch of these projects, as I said, and you can go to stevoaccelerator.com to get a more in-depth look into what the projects are.
And we also run one of them with a partner, as you can see down here.
And my only two bullet slides are not really that interesting.
I just showed them to say that I showed that on the slide if you ask questions after.
Mentoring, structure, network and partners, infrastructure for the research project.
It kind of makes sense.
The trade-offs, we do a lot of CSR this way, we get access to innovation, work with the universities, inspire our own people, employer branding.
And as I said before, a lot of good press, which I also like.
But let's take a look inside of the accelerator.
What goes on here?
Obviously a lot of studying.
These are students.
A lot of coding because we're interested in the technology part of this.
Every single Wednesday we get all of the teams together.
Right now I have seven teams, six master thesis, bachelor thesis and a startup.
And they all share their progress.
So they get inspiration across the different fields they work in.
They may not even work for the same industry.
Some work for retailers, some work for research retailers, and some research the news industry, and some research printing.
But it's so great because when you're in a group like this, right now we have a total of 18 people in the accelerator.
They can help each other out in ways that we had never imagined.
Sometimes what they need is help, generate ideas.
Here's a focus group that Sarah and Anne are working with facial recognition together with Q8.
Facial recognition for advertising.
They needed to generate a bunch of ideas.
So the students in the accelerator help each other do that.
Sometimes what the students need is technology.
Here's a team, Mass and LAS, who wanted to do an interactive fitness mat.
What does that have to do with our industries?
It has everything to do with our industry.
The partner for this project was Bonnier, who publishes active training and forms a fitness magazine for men and women.
So the point is that when the fitness mat analyzes your workout, when your workout is done,
it will recommend articles in these two magazines that fit your workout routine.
Another example is Daniel and Tina, who wanted to work with virtual reality.
But their take on it was, let's not force everyone to put on goggles and look like idiots.
I'm a big fan of virtual reality, but there is an idiot factor or a Google Glass factor in it as well.
So they wanted to make a virtual reality room.
And working with a news publisher, they wanted to tell the story of what it's like to be inside a Syrian refugee camp.
And they specifically wanted it to be available for schools.
So they could send in an entire school class to experience what it's like to be in a Syrian refugee camp.
So using a Microsoft basis and Kinect cameras and projectors,
they made an interactive room where you could walk through a Syrian refugee camp and get that experience.
Very cool stuff as well.
Sometimes what the students need is a supermarket.
And it's actually fairly easy to go to a major retailer and say, we want to make an interactive supermarket.
We want to put a Raspberry Pi, those of you who know that, see that this is 28 Raspberry Pis booting up.
And you can only start imagining what you can do if every single price tag in a supermarket is a computer.
You can suddenly start thinking about sensors.
You can start thinking about loyalty.
If I put in my app that I want to reduce my sugar intake,
maybe when I go and pick up the crucily up there, it would recommend and say, hey, there's another alternative over here that can make you fulfill your goal of taking in less sugar.
And you can also think about cameras and other sensors like you're too fat, so take that or whatever.
But the whole point is that these three students, Siran, Anderson, Lauwis, who work with this,
are talking directly to the top digital management of Rayman Tuxen.
And they went to Rayman with 14 ideas, 14 completely disruptive ideas for Rayman.
And they just loved it. They absolutely loved it.
And it wasn't because they were going to go directly and implement this in all of the local Rayman Tuxen around Denmark,
but they loved the inspiration and they give 10 times more than I would have expected to these students.
We take the students and the startups to exhibitions and trade shows, let them present on our booths,
just a five to eight minute technology update, what we're working on, what could be possible.
And those of you who go to trade shows know that it's completely impossible to have a presentation in a theater like that
and attract people because you made a new version of your software. Now I can push a button.
Nobody really cares about that. But this is something that attracts a lot of attention, a lot of press.
And they get to talk and discuss these topics directly with the people who may be using their product in the future.
Great for a startup, great for students to get feedback on their projects.
Sometimes the ones that visit them on the trade shows actually come visit us in our headquarter in Højbyer.
This is a media group from Germany. We took the trip up here and now they created their own accelerator.
And I love that idea because now we're working with that accelerator.
I'm going to go visit them and see more about how they work and we can connect our teams together.
Sometimes we take the students and the startups to do workshops.
Neuer Osnabrück Assytum in Osnabrück obviously wanted to know more about wearables and we said, cool, we'll put together a half day program.
Bring some Google Glass, some smart watches and make a half day workshop.
That's a great learning experience for the students.
And for us it's a great relationship creation with a potential customer of one of our systems.
But it's not all work. Of course there's also time for fun and games.
We have to do some fun stuff for the students. We go bowling, we go eating, we do hackathons.
We invite a bunch of the sharpest minds to come hack with us for a weekend.
We have one coming up in the autumn called The Future of the Supermarket.
That's also going to be great.
But again, as I said in the beginning, all of this what you've seen is supposed to be an infusion, not an injection.
Infusion meaning that when I ask these two guys to talk to a group of developers from CCI, they have a monthly meeting.
And every now and then they ask us to come talk about some of these new technologies.
That's a real developer for you.
That's a great way for these people who have been working in the same track for so many years and they're working with the same code.
Now they get new inspiration from these guys. And I have a lot of possibility to inspire them that way.
Sometimes when we're extremely lucky and we select the right topic with the right partner at the right time, like this one,
then the product management of one of our divisions actually came to this startup and said,
hey, you know a lot about that, obviously. Can you help us build a prototype that we can go out and demo even before the Apple Watch in this case comes out?
And they did. Startups work completely different than big corporations like us.
So that was a great example of infusion actually becoming a real product.
But that doesn't happen all the time and you have to accept that.
You have to accept that having an accelerator like this is like putting a red sock in the white laundry.
That's perfectly fine. You want the color of innovation to rub off of the rest of the organization.
Don't expect an accelerator idea or initiative like this to be the game changer, to be the R&D.
So to sum it up a little bit, should an accelerator drive sales, marketing, R&D and recruitment?
Sales, we all know that relationship selling rocks. It's just so fantastic to have a good close relationship with your potential customers.
But remember that the sales people, they have a specific D&I. They really like seeking out their own prospects.
They like nurturing the sales process in their very specific way.
I can see a lot of nodding because it's strange, but they actually don't like you bringing new prospects in their lab, maybe cases.
Don't expect praise for bringing in potential prospects this way because there may be things in the market that you don't know about
that they know much better about. Marketing, full steam ahead. Oh absolutely.
As I said, I spent seven years as the VP for marketing for CCI before I made the shift and did this full time.
And trust me, in the first year of running the accelerator, I have generated more articles, more press coverage than I did in the past five years as a marketing manager.
So it's not because I'm completely untalented. It's just because this is a topic that everyone wants to hear about.
So go ahead, openly sharing passion, curiosity, dreams and hope is something that everybody wants and everybody will pretty much like you for doing.
R&D, remember the green and the red dots. Please keep remembering them. This is not your R&D.
I like the split of research in one and development in the other. This is infusion. This is rubbing off students.
Rubbing off students and startups will not become your R&D department and the R&D should never feel threatened that you want to change what they do.
Recruitment, ooh yes. Is it difficult to find good digital talent? Absolutely.
Here's a six month creative relationship that's really an interview process.
And a good example for someone who really did the right thing, this is Didde. It's kind of dark.
But Didde wrote her master thesis together with bestseller on the value of personal data and what you can do with personal data and so on.
This is her first working day, October 1st on the stage in Berlin at our European customer days.
Talk about hitting the ground running. That's pretty cool that we were able to do that.
Another good example is this guy Nesse who now works for Lego.
So is it a success for us if he goes through a process and then goes work for Lego? Absolutely.
He's a great friend of ours and if I need to talk to Lego at some point, I know where to go. So that's fantastic.
And this is truly an invitation. I absolutely am passionate about making more of these accelerator initiatives.
I don't care what Steve-O gets out of it or if anyone gets anything out of it in my space.
I just want more crazy, wild, safe environments for testing, trying, failing and so on.
And what better resource than the students and the startups who are so knowledgeable and so passionate about this.
And if you work for a big company, I do understand that it may be a bit scary to launch something that wakes up a sleeping bear.
But think about it. It will be fun as hell and it is really, really needed and it's not that expensive.
So thanks. Stay in touch. I'll meet you. Call me. Thank you.
