mandag, marts 21, 2011

BridgeSpinner


In the winter of 2010-11 I led an investment round and total reconstruction of a truly innovative startup: BridgeSpinner. The company has invented a revolutionary gaming console for  the game of bridge - the worlds maybe most popular card game. Bridge has not been innovated since it's creation in the beginning of last century, and where Poker has undergone massive change in the last 10-15 years and is now attracting young players with exiting game play, Bridge has stalled. This is now changing with online offerings, and whole new possibilities are opening up.
The BridgeSpinner uniquely and literally building a bridge between the social offline game play with real cards and four friends around a table, and the digital online univers with its vast community and learning offerings. Its kind of an advanced internet-enables card shuffler and game registrator. This allows everybody to play multiplayer games, participating simultaneously in tournaments around the world and accessing game data to improve your game and learn the tricks.
The company is mow on the road with a new business plan and great partnerships and if all goes well launches in US at the end of 2011.
I now serve as chairman of the board and co-owns the company with some very dynamic, talented and visionary folks.

eCouture by Lund


I've taken a stake in a wonderful fashion company: eCouture by Lund with the talentet costume designer Johanne Helger Lund at the helm. Johanne's design are truly and daringly feminine – and to top if off all created in nontoxic eco-cotton, silk etc. with very high regards for the production proces.
We hade created a whole new radical strategy for eCouture, building on the strong and true story in Johanne's design to break drastically with the traditional ways of doing fashion business.
eCouture now has one of the biggest loyal Facebook followings in the Danish fashion industry, with a 100% focus on Johanne's dedication to real women – daring to dress in red.

mandag, februar 28, 2011

Storytelling about innovation: The Kondratieff 6th Wave....

When working as a business designer and trying to help companies innovate for the future, the main challenge I find, is often not one of designing the new future business area or product, but rather one of creating strong ownership and cross organizational storytelling about this future, that allows management to implement. I frequently have the pleasure of teaching MBAs in innovation – and the opportunity of testing first hand how storytelling can enhance operational will to implementation. One of my key entry points to this storytelling is the idea of mega trends: How future business design and innovation must be based on long term trends, rather than short business cycles.

And when it comes to mega trends, one of the strongest with huge business impacts on all – but also one of the hardest to really understand businesswise – is the fall out with nature: The global environmental crisis.

So whenever I come across new ways of telling the sustainbility story and the opportunities for innovation rising from the environmental mega trend, I bring it on board. And recently I have been reading up on older economic theories on long term trends, including the old Russian economist Kondratieff's wave theory. This theory is hugely debated, but as another of my favorite models, Maslow's hierachy of needs, Kondratieff's wave model has an intuitive storytelling quality that far outpaces it's lack of consensus and evidential proof in the world of economics.

Australian outfit "The Natural Edge Project" has caught on to this, and uses Kondratieff to tell the story about a 6th innovation wave: The green wave, that some how strikes the managers and CEOs that I work with as intuitive: