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.