GOUD - a Belgium startup - created a new service for people in their golden years, allowing them to uphold their independence and freedom while enjoying their lives.

GOUD was part of the 6th F10 accelerator program in Zurich. F10 is an early startup accelerator in Switzerland supporting qualified startups globally. I had the pleasure to mentor GOUD through 2020 and 2021 and enjoy seeing the great outcome in its class.

I had the great pleasure to mentor the Seattle/USA based Fintech startup "C2SEC2 throughout 2018 as part of the F10 accelerator program in Zurich.

C2SEC provides an innovative analytics platform, that creates a digital footprint of a company and quantifies cybers risk in financial terms. It does so by combining patented big data, artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber security technologies. With its solution, C2SEC makes cyber risks visible, provides a price tag and gives the C-level an recommendation list how to mitigate those risks. 

Singapore based start-up “oBike” received a lot of press coverage in Europe lately. The company basically had placed hundreds well visible and standardised bikes into cities to foster bike sharing culture, increase flexibility and extend mobility.

The city I live in has been evaluating its own bicycle sharing concept for a while. It then opened a tender for the best provider to win. Since then the winner has been designing the solution along the agreed requirements. The whole process has taken many years and the service is not yet available. I have never really understood why it takes so long. But the city will have its reasons. Then came oBike and everything changed. How?

Have you ever presented an innovation to your boss or stakeholders? And have you ever been greeted with plenty of questions, most of which you didn’t know how to answer?

How can you test and evaluate new ideas quickly? Let’s look at the options.

Disruptive innovation happens across all industries and markets. Sometimes, the disruption is only recognised in a particular field of activity. From time to time it is visible to everybody around the globe. This is especially true if the innovation touches as solution for the every-day consumer. And in recent years, we have seen a lot of innovation in the technology field.  What’s next?

If you work for a large corporation you most probably were already confronted with the importance of innovation several times in recent years. Some even call it a buzz word or overhype meanwhile. But just because “innovation" might get mentioned more often than in the past, does it present less value or significance?

It’s key to understand why it has always been important for organisations and why it will remain important in the future.

User or customer experience has been a popular topic among all industries since long. Whether you want to buy a new car, kitchen or smartphone, product designers try to please you on all senses in order to trigger purchase desire. But once the customer owns the product, user experience does not stop. And here is where some brands really excel and others not so much.

A few months ago I had purchased an expensive sports bag on wheels. I had no previous experience with that premium brand but liked the layout of the product. In addition, I appreciated the promise of a good service and quality. Although I could not imagine why one would ever need a service for a sports bag, I somehow tried to justify the high price to myself. Obviously, the salesperson did a great job. What happened then?