Making the New

In this episode, we interviewed Raphael Schoettler, he leads the Intrapreneur Initiative at the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt.  The Intrapreneur Initiative was created in 2018 and a few businesses came out of this program – but probably the most important outcome has been a revival of the bank's culture after a decade and a half of major crises. From the housing bubble to the libor manipulation scandal and several billions of euros in fines and settlements, Deutsche Bank has faced rock bottom, both from a performance and an image perspective. As the current CEO Christian Sewing led a turnaround that now starts showing its first positive results, the bank also invested internally and empowered employees to work more like entrepreneurs. In this conversation with Raphael you will learn: - how the Intrapreneur Initiative works and its main results so far - its impact in employee moral -the main challenges of transforming a 150-year old organisation -the difficulties of trying to work like a startup in a corporation * The innovation agency Making the New actively contributed to the design, execution and international expansion of the Intrapreneur Initiative.  

In this episode, I talk to Stefanie Palomino, founder of the agency Red Lab in Berlin. She started creating digital products in the 1990s and now supports corporations that want to become more innovative.   In our conversation, she talks about how she helps companies find the problem behind the problem, about her book on women and professional success and about the benefits of being a bit more experienced in the digital scene.

In this episode, I interviewed Mahdi Manesh, director of the Porsche Digital Lab. From his office in Berlin, overlooking the river Spree, Mahdi and his team investigate new technologies and what they could mean for Porsche in the future. Their work goes way beyond power-point presentations: they actually build rough prototypes and test them right away. He will tell you, for example, about an experiment that started with a coffee machine and ended with a solution for an actual problem at the assembly line.

Christoph Raethke is a known character in the startup scene in Berlin. Over the last 20 years, founded businesses, created an independent accelerator and became a mentor and investor to dozens of startups. Now he also helps corporations that want to become more entrepreneurial. In this interview, Christoph talks about how robust the startup scene has become in Berlin in the last few years and also about the progress made by corporate innovation programs so far.

You probably already heard about Design Thinking. Maybe you even took part in a Design Thinking workshop. The method became so popular in the last 20 years that it is now a buzzword, sold by many as the silver bullet solution to innovation. So, this might be the right time to ask: what is it really good for? The interaction designer Molly Wilson has taught Design Thinking for several years in Stanford and in the Hasso Plattner Institute, in Potsdam. She talks about the origins of the method, why it works and how to recognize when it has reached its limits.

The pharmaceutical and life sciences company Bayer is one of the Germany’s largest corporations. Research and Development is at its core, but now the company is trying to expand the concept of innovation. Beyond new products, Bayer wants to create new ways of designing, marketing and selling. It also wants to simplify processes and become a more agile organization. This episode is an interview with Julia Hitzbleck, she is head of the Lifehub Berlin, a safe space for employees to create outside of the company’s traditional structure.

With more than 260 years old, VGH is one of the most traditional insurance companies in the world. About a year ago, they decided to create a new company, called Futur X. The goal is to support not only VGH but also other companies in the region of lower Saxony in innovation projects. I was in Hannover and met with Christian Brömer, creative coach at Futur X. He talked about the challenges faced by the insurance industry and his plans to persuade people to work in a more user-centered way. This interview was recorded in late 2018.    

If you were a procurement manager looking for chemical components in the 80s, this is how your routine would look like: you would spend most of your time talking to suppliers over the phone, meeting them for lunch and traveling to trade fairs. Good prices would depend largely on the relationships you have in the industry. And after days of scouting, you would fill out a form and send it by fax to place your order. It might sound anachronistic, but this is more or less how the market for chemical components still looks like today. CheMondis, a startup backed by the German multinational Lanxess, is trying to change that. It just started offering a digital platform to connect buyers and suppliers.   In this interview, managing director Sebastian Brenner, explained the process behind the creation of this corporate startup. He also talks about the necessary distance that CheMondis needs to keep from Lanxess to succeed in the market.  

The risk of disruption seems to be a topic for most corporations nowadays – and in the eye of the storm is the mobility industry. The success of completely new business models, such as Uber and Lyft, coupled with the promises of the shared economy and autonomous driving, have put companies under pressure to design new products and services. In this episode I talked to Nico Gramenz, vice-president of strategy and digital transformation at Siemens Mobility Management. This part of the company focuses on road and rail infrastructure.  Nico spent years in the military and served in Afghanistan before working with mergers and acquisitions at Siemens. Now his job is to help his company take advantage of the digitalization. He started his journey learning from a previous victim of disruption: the music industry.

How to help traditional German butchers innovate? This is a particularly tough crowd: mostly men in their 50s, leading family businesses in small German towns. To support the craftsmanship, Frank Kühne and Olga Graf created the Trüffeljagd, a movement that connects, inspires and equips butchers wishing to change. Full disclosure: Coaeva has helped design this solution. 

How can a traditional rubber company produce smart digital products? This is the challenge of Chris Seeger, head of innovation and digitalization at Contitech, a division of Continental - the German multinational most known for manufacturing car tires. Chris is now responsible for building an innovation lab from scratch: choosing projects, hiring a team and even designing a working space. Our conversation took place in Hamburg, inside an old factory building that is now being refurbished to host his venture. The location was very carefully chosen: the charming empty building is it located in the middle of an active rubber plant. The idea is to integrate the digital team with the core manufacturing business that is all around it. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva, a business design in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, please check our website: www.coaeva.de.

From robots that carry letters to electric vehicles built by the Deutsche Post itself: these are some of the innovation efforts at Germany’s traditional postal service. In a scenario where fewer people are willing to work delivering parcels door to door and where cities are already blocked with cars, the company has to become more creative to stay in business. From his office in Bonn, Clemens Beckmann, executive vice president of innovation at Deustche Post, told me about other solutions he is working on right now to address the growth of online commerce. He also talked about a harsh competitive landscape: with low margins and a powerful Amazon, willing to leave profitability for the future.  

If you have been listening to this podcast, you probably realized by now that it is very hard to talk about innovation without talking about entrepreneurship. So in this episode, we are trying to find out how entrepreneurial Germany is. Unfortunately, according to our guest, the situation is not the most encouraging. Benjamin Knöfler is secretary general of the Junger Mittelstand, an organization that represents a new generation of leaders at small and medium size companies. He explains why young people in Germany don’t seem to have the right incentives to start new businesses and what could be done to change that.    This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva, a business design agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, please check our website: www.coaeva.de.

The Impact Hub is a community of markers dedicated to the topic of sustainability. There are 100 hubs around the world and one of them is in Berlin. I was there to get to know their co-working space and to talk to Anna Laesser, the co-founder. In this interview, Anna told me about the kind of grassroots projects developed at the Impact Hub and why more and more corporations and traditional governmental organizations want to get involved. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva, a business design agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, please check our website: www.coaeva.de.

At this point, most corporations have a created an innovation lab or a startup accelerator in the attempt to develop new businesses. Deutsche Telekom, the telecommunications giant, is part of this group, but they also decided to invest in something a bit different. The UQBATE is an accelerator for internal ideas. Employees that take part in the program continue to receive a wage but have the time and support to explore new ventures.   Johannes Nuenning is a business angel for corporate entrepreneurs at Deutsche Telekom. In this interview, he shares what he has learned in years trying to empower employees to become intrapreneurs. This episode is a bit longer than usual, but I really encourage you to listen until the end. Johannes was very honest during our conversation and I think we can all learn from his experience, specially those struggling to push innovation forward in big corporations.   This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation. Learn more about us at www.coaeva.de.

Digitalization is a big challenge for companies in several sectors, but it is particularly so for TÜV Nord, a testing and certifying multinational working with all sorts of industries. The company inspects from cars to satellites and children’s toys. As their clients become digital, so too must their certifying process. In this interview, Stefan Kistler, senior manager of corporate strategy and innovation, talks about promoting change in this 120-year old corporation.  This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de.  

In this episode, we explore a very traditional German success story: we are featuring a family-owned, medium-size, 120-year-old organization. Pascoe is a homeopathic medicine company. It has received for two consecutive years the award of best employer in Germany by the organization Best Place to Work. The CEO, Annette Pascoe, shares several lessons about talent management and product innovation that might be particularly interesting to other small and medium-size organizations. This time the conversation was conducted in German by my partner at Coaeva, Alissa Rohrbach.  Making the New is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation. If you want to know more about us, visit our website: www.coaeva.de

Online shopping has changed the lives of people in big cities. As consumers, we have become used to having things delivered to our doorstep. We are also used to not paying - or paying very little - for this kind of convenience. This imposes a huge challenge to companies like Hermes, one of Germany's leading logistics companies. In this episode, Martin Andresen, senior manager of strategy and innovation, explains how he is trying to improve the so-called “last mile logistics”, which is delivering a parcel to its final destination. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de

Airbus, a giant in the aerospace industry, has recently created an accelerator to transform ideas into new businesses. The program of the Bizlab is open to both employees and external startups. In this interview, Rey Buckman explains why a global corporation - that is normally busy closing multimillion dollar deals - decided to invest in much smaller new businesses. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de

Industry as we know it has been changing dramatically in the last few years.The sector is going through what is called the fourth industrial revolution. The idea behind the Industry 4.0 is that factories should become smarter with the use of automation and data exchange technologies. Germany, as a traditional manufacturing hub, is specially interested in leading change - and Andrea Rosen's job is to facilitate this process. At Cube, she matches corporations with deep tech startups from all over the world, that are helping build the industry of the future. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de

Kathrin Haug is managing director at Deloitte Digital and her job is to help corporations innovate in the digital space. We talked about the challenge of keeping two different mindsets under the same roof: the traditional one, that still delivers most of the profit in big companies and the more agile culture that is needed for innovation. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de

This episode is a conversation with our colleagues at J2C, an innovation and business transformation agency. We discuss the main challenges faced by German companies trying to innovate — and what we have learned over the years trying to support them. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de

The startup Urban Sports Club created a new way of doing sports: instead of signing a contract with a specific fitness center, users pay a flat rate and get access to more than 50 different sports and more than a thousand gyms in Germany. In this interview, Benjamin Roth, one of the co-founders, explains how he came up with the flat rate idea and how he continues to foster innovation at Urban Sports Club.  This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de

How do you innovate in a 170 year-old organization? This is the job of Danny Krautz, senior manager of new ventures at Zeiss, a German multinational in the optics industry with more 5 billion euros in revenues and operations in 30 countries. Danny focuses on one specific part of the company’s overall innovation strategy: investing in early stage high-technology startups. In this interview, he talks about how hard it is to find a right match and how important the Berlin innovation scene has become. This podcast is an initiative from Coaeva Innovation, a creative agency in Berlin. If you want to know more about us, check out our website: www.coaeva.de