Innov8rs Zurich (14-15 September 2022)

The corona pandemic has heavily affected the hospitality industry, in particular by accelerating the work from home trend. To respond to the long-lasting change and new customer needs, companies need to leverage digital technology and new business models in order to stay relevant. The SV Group is investing strategically in new opportunity areas like delivery and unmanned food service solutions to accelerate the transformation. To increase speed to market, the group uses design thinking and lean startup methodologies that puts the customer front and center of its innovation, as you’ll hear in this talk.

Stephanie Naegeli is Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer for the Swiss food service company SV Group. In her role, she oversees the marketing, culinary and sustainability team and is responsible for the innovation strategy and roadmap for the group. Before joining SV Group, Stephanie worked for 11 years for Nestlé, where she was the founding member of the Nestlé Silicon Valley Innovation Outpost. In this team, she worked closely with emerging technology players and startups to develop digitally-enabled services and new business models. Stephanie holds a master’s degree in Marketing, Services and Communication Management from the University of St. Gallen (HSG).

Managing corporate innovation is no longer just about applying human focus by using Design Thinking, or agile fast-cycled project management – it is about introducing resiliency and long-term success into innovation, that is risky by definition, and often considered an art rather than a science. How to do that?

Join this session to hear about a framework that we have been continuously evolving at SAP, that combines different perspectives and methods into an actionable innovation approach that drives feasible, desirable, viable and sustainable outcomes, throughout the maturity phases of innovation.

Tonja leads the Research, Insights and Incubation team in Intelligent Enterprise Institute of SAP, helping customers realize the power of the intelligent, sustainable enterprise. Tonja is an experienced innovation, venture and growth strategy expert with 20 years of emerging digital technology and consulting experience with leading global businesses. She has founded and built multiple new businesses, mentoring and leading business and technology professionals to achieve breakthrough growth. She’s successfully managed global transformative initiatives to incubate new business models and growth programs. Before joining SAP Tonja worked in several ICT start-ups. She lives and has worked in Switzerland, Singapore, and Australia.

So you have 1’000s of ideas to test, fail, and sometimes even grow? But on day X – how do you prove that your innovation program is worth the while (and the budget)? There are various KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), you can measure and track along the way, but which one to choose?

In this session, Swisscom’s Michael Hunkeler shares the secret how he measures success of the KICKBOX program.

This session will outline an approach for integrating sustainability into your organization’s innovation strategy with a specific focus on creating organic growth and new business opportunities. This session will also provide a market overview of the green sector and what considerations you should take into account to use sustainability as a driver for strategy and new business.

Patricia is a seasoned strategy executive with 20+ years in growth strategy, business model innovation and building new ventures from the inside of corporates. At Hitachi’s Environment Business Division, she leads a global team from her home-base in Lausanne, Switzerland, in Ideation, Strategy and Business Modelling with the purpose to build and accelerate new sustainable and green digital businesses.

The world is rapidly changing and companies are forced to follow or even be ahead of the change. With a structured and simple program like KICKBOX any employee can become the CEO of their idea and help shape the business models of the future.

Karel van Eechoud is leading the Implenia Innovation Hub since 2019 and is senior innovation manager at Implenia, Switzerland’s leading construction and real estate services provider. Before he joined Implenia, he worked as management consultant and freelance innovation manager in the Netherlands for various consulting companies and clients in both the public and private sector.

Innovation in the insurance landscape often follows a top-down approach. To foster bottom-up innovation and sustainably change the mindset of employees, Zurich Insurance needed a state-of-the-art solution. KICKBOX facilitates cultural change and empowers employees to get active and become the CEOs of their ideas.

Dominic Brügger started at Zurich Switzerland in 2019. He is working in the Transformation & Technology department (previously Operations). His responsibilities include project management, innovation promotion and trend scouting. Together with a co-worker he introduced the intrapreneurship-method “Kickbox” at Zurich CH in 2022. Luca Ambühl is working in the Transformation & Technology department for Zurich Switzerland. He is responsible for the development of new business solutions inside P&C IT. Together with a co-worker he introduced the intrapreneurship-method “Kickbox” at Zurich Switzerland in 2022.

Aleks Petkov is part of Raiffeisen Bank International’s innovation team and talks about how running an intrapreneurship program resulted in the discovery of an unexpected treasure box of innovation blockers and organizational learnings.

In this session, you will hear what systematic challenges the intrapreneurship exposed and its learnings. Not only can you expect of practical advice on what elements are essential for running an internal innovation program but moreover, what leadership and governance models, team compositions & HR related requirements, and cultural aspects you need to consider when you want to revamp an existing management system to enable business model innovation.

Aleks Petkov is an innovation expert, entrepreneur, speaker, and lecturer. Having pushed boundaries and speaking out what others don’t, she had been once called out a “Corporate Punk” – a title she now wears with pride. Aleks is working as a Senior Innovation Manager at Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI), one of the leading financial services groups in Central Easter Europe. In her role in the Organisational Innovation team, she co-creates ecosystems, management systems, governance structures, and corporate innovation programs so that the organization can withhold disruption.

In this session, Christoph Hunziker, Head of Innovation at the insurance company La Mobilière shares insights of an adventurous journey of building and establishing an international cross-company Innovation Lab. La Mobilière is one of the three funding partners as part of an alliance of mutually organized insurance companies in Europe.

He will talk about the gains, pains and learnings during the building and the first three years of the Lab and how La Mobilière and the other partner companies benefit from this unique open innovation approach.

Christoph Hunziker is Head of Innovation at La Mobilière, one of Switzerlands leading insurance companies. Christoph is an innovation enthusiast with 20 years experience in innovation roles within an FMCG company, consulting and now since 2017 in his current position where his team helps the company to grow new business opportunities based on strategic topics and trends. He was part of the funding team of an international cross-company Innovation Lab based in Stockholm. He studied Business Management and Creative Leadership. Apart from work, Christoph is a family guy, football aficionado and cosmopolitan who has lived in different countries and cultures.

Consistent innovation capabilities are key to any company’s success. Thus, many businesses are establishing designated innovation roles and corporate innovation teams. But getting traction within the organization and getting support from relevant stakeholder isn’t as straight forward as it might seem.

In this session Dr. Kerstin Fröhlich will share insights from four years of innovation practice at SPIEGEL-Gruppe. She will highlight the different stages that innovation management went through, share what worked and what did not and give practical advice on how to build innovation management as a corporate function in mid-sized companies.

Kerstin is a business-minded innovation leader with wide-ranging experience from international corporate to digital startup and German Mittelstand. She builds teams, processes, and ecosystems to identify relevant innovation opportunities and transform vision into tangible products and viable businesses. In her current role at SPIEGEL-Gruppe Kerstin leads group-wide innovation and new business projects and strengthens the company’s innovation capability. Additionally, she is responsible for market and trend research and the external innovation ecosystem. Previously, she has held various positions in both legacy and digital media companies, ranging from corporate development to product management and editorial work. She holds a PhD in media economics from University of Zurich.

Before you can build a prototype, validate a product/market fit, and scale for success, you need to identify the most promising ideas. Ideas, however, are a dime a dozen. How can you make sure that you have the best set of ideas? And once you have those ideas, how can you see them through to fruition? The practice of Strategic Foresight detects changes on the horizon, builds a common vision for the future, identifies relevant opportunities, and paves the way for getting things done.

Foresight empowers organizations to engage both proactively and systematically with the future, getting from “we should do this“ to “we did that.“ It bridges the gap between identifying innovative, future-proof ideas, generating impact, and providing real value. In addition to outlining foresight methodologies, Tobias will share examples of foresight-driven innovation that really works with stories from clients: cooking up the future of chocolate with Mondelez, thinking beyond beer with ABInBev moonshots, or scoping vertical farming at Siemens.

Tobias is the Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer at Creative Dock Group, the world’s largest independent corporate venture builder. There, he leads a team of more than 50 passionate and experienced experts whose mission it is to support clients in improving their innovation capabilities. Tobias is also Founder and Managing Director at Rohrbeck Heger where he advises clients such as Bosch, Deutsche Telekom, Hyundai, LG, Mondelez, Siemens, Tata Group, Webasto, and many more. Tobias’ background is in foresight, innovation management, and strategy.

Before joining Creative Dock Group and founding Rohrbeck Heger, Tobias was Head of Innovation at EIT Digital Germany, a PPP focusing on strengthening European competitiveness in the digital domain. During this period he has worked with clients from multiple industries with a focus on the future perspective, digital businesses, and the application areas of information technology. A futurist at heart, Tobias engages in building up new companies in addition to his day-to-day job. He is an active researcher, lecturer, and business angel. His research has been published in leading international journals and on conferences such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Futures, ISPIM and the R&D Management Conference. Through his investment company Tobias advises founders, with a particular focus on IT, logistics, and mobility.

Successful innovation begins with understanding your best target consumers. The goal of Dimensional Design is to help you better connect with your target audience and reach the fringe consumer that is often becoming mainstream. In this workshop we share our tool for understanding what consumers want and need and dive into the triggers that shape human behavior, facilitating the predictions on how they might engage with your product, service or business in the future. We’re making our new “Dimensional Design” tool available in this workshop for a test-drive. In this interactive customizable session we help you apply this tool to your current challenges or to your business ambitions – helping you find new opportunities and better understand your consumers.

With over a decade of experience in building healthcare & consumer goods strategies for the most ambitious organizations, Vincent is one of Board of Innovations global partners. He fulfils a key role as leader of global partnerships of the firm after founding the activities of Board of Innovation In NY. His position as Business Model Innovation Lead at Philips is one of the highlights of his track-record at our firm. Passionate about realizing new growth opportunities for clients, and making things happen, Vincent has supported leading businesses including Nestlé, Roche, Takeda, Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, and GE Healthcare in making what life needs next.

Claudia Bienentreu, Head of Open Innovation at AXA Switzerland and Ivan Brustlein, CEO and founder of Swibeco, will share their leanings on how a collaboration between corporates and startups can work out. They will talk about the reason why collaboration makes sense, how they made it work, what they have achieved over the years and what the challenges have been and still are.

Claudia Bienentreu is heading the innovation team “AXAnauten” at AXA Switzerland. Her mission is to enable collaborations between AXA and external innovation partners like startups and corporations to develop open innovation initiatives and unlock new business opportunities. She has a strong background in strategic marketing and communications and has been working in the financial services industry in Switzerland and Germany in the past 20 years. She is passionate about understanding customer needs, technology trends, developing innovative business models and connecting people and ideas.

Ivan Brustlein is a Swiss citizen, married and father of two children. He immediately entered the world of entrepreneurship and business development after his Master’s degree in Law at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Straight after his studies, Ivan launched his first start-up in 2008. He then worked at Altran (leader in technology consulting) as a Manager for 5 years before launching his second start-up, Swibeco in 2015. Swibeco has 40+ employees and 4’000+ B2B clients in Switzerland.

Innovation is key for organizations to evolve, to stay relevant and to prevail in the long-run. Especially in times of great uncertainty, organizations currently tend to rush into agile, design thinking, co-creation and many more actions to address these necessities. However especially in regulatory-driven organizations the will to change and actually changing are two different stories.

Organizations often try to kick-start from zero to hero and thereby hope or assume to overcome “the little things” and structural impediments that matter to people who are supposed to shoulder this transformation. Innovators like us are on the spot to navigate these unchartered waters, not solely but especially at the beginning of this journey and foster a “connecting the dots perspective” to get the ball rolling without fully breaking with established pillars of the organization. It is not only about textbook methods or the best playbook, but rather about building a bridge for innovation to evolve in the organizations mindset and culture.

In this talk, Sascha will share learnings, better practices and insights from the journey of Deutsche WertpapierService Bank AG (dwpbank) and his project experience leading innovation and digitization initiatives in financial services.

Sascha is a financial services professional with 15+ years’ work experience in strategic transformation. He worked in front-office roles along the banking value chain and lead various regulatory-driven as well as innovation-driven initiatives as a management consultant (e.g. KPMG) in financial services before he took over heading the digitization management for dwpbank. In his current role he is responsible for the digital strategy and its execution with topics such as crypto, data science and platform economy as well as fostering a strategic innovation management. Passionate about nurturing innovation throughout the process, Sascha with great curiosity loves connecting the dots from strategy to implementation and enabling people to make change and innovation happen.

It all starts with an idea. But bringing it to life is the real challenge. At Zurich, with 56,000 employees spread out across the world, this challenge takes on a whole new dimension: How do you make them heard across country borders and functions? And how do you then go about implementing those ideas across the whole organization? Throughout our 150-year history, collaboration has always been key to move ideas forward.

With that in mind, Zurich launched two flagship programs, the Zurich Innovation Championship, through which Zurich sources the best and boldest ideas from startups, and Make the Difference, a “grass-root innovation” program which gives our employees the tools to bring their ideas to life across the organization. Three editions of the Zurich innovation Championship ZIC and nine cycles of Make the Difference later, here’s our story of tearing down internal silos to create a cross-organizational innovation culture.

Joel Agard, a millennial with a hands-on attitude to make innovation reality in a transforming industry Joel is an innovation executive with a background in tech, telco, media and healthcare and has worked for both startups and global corporations. Since 2019, he has been responsible for various external innovation initiatives within Zurich Insurance Group, including the largest startup tournament in insurance, the ‘Zurich Innovation Championship’. He holds a Master of Applied Science degree in ‘Business Administration’ as well as an Executive MBA in ‘Innovation Management and New Business Development’. Born and raised in Zurich, Switzerland, he shares a global mindset, leading back to his Caribbean, Italian and Dutch roots. Joel Agard is passionate about exploring the opportunities of innovation and, through the initiatives he is leading, is helping to foster an open innovation culture in a global company with more than 55’000 employees to protect future generations in an ever-changing world. Stuart Domingos, CFA heads Group Innovation, responsible for fostering innovation at Zurich through knowledge exchange and implementation of new approaches that improve our customer service; including a global program of execution, Make the Difference. Stuart brings underwriting and finance skills, along with an established network in insurtech. Stuart graduated in Applied Mathematics, completed a Post-Graduation in Economics and European Affairs; and became a CFA Charterholder in 2014. Stuart lives in Zurich, Switzerland. His key hobbies consist in cooking so he can run his marathons.