Accelerator success stories
When E.ON started the :agile Nordic accelerator in 2016, we focused on three principles that would guide our work:
- Do it yourself: build the accelerator from scratch to learn as much as possible from the innovation work.
- Release employees: make sure teams get out of the corporate buildings to meet customers, minimise distraction and learn faster.
- Integrate, integrate, integrate: combine the domain expertise of E.ONs employees with the skills of the local startup community.
Today, we see great results from this approach. For example, two teams of E.ON employees in our latest batch have created very promising startups in just four months.
Verve
Åsa and Fredrik are working on a new way for customers to buy energy. They have been using interview methods such as The Mom Test very efficiently. By knowing how to listen to potential customers and how to ask for commitments, they could speed up their learning during the customer development phase. After weeks of research and numerous interviews that led nowhere, they eventually made a breakthrough discovery. Verve found a group of consumers who have a strong affinity for everything that is locally produced and green. Now, they are optimising the user experience for this target group while fine tuning their business model.
Followapp
Martin founded Followapp to help organisations such as E.ON collaborate better with sub-contractors, e.g. when performing installation work in customer’s homes. His expertise in the problems that can arise in these projects gave him a flying start and he quickly found test customers to work with. This eanbled Martin to start using the Concierge and Wizard of Oz methods very early in his work. These effective methods can help startups to test the user experience of potential products before building anything. With some simple modifications, Martin has mainly been using Slack as a prototype to explore which features might be the most important for his own product. Now he’s in a great position to implement a new communication solution that he knows customers will use and pay for.
What’s next?
The teams in :agile Nordic has shown that employees from E.ON can innovate quickly when combining their expertise with the customer development methods taught at the accelerator. Now we are preparing for the next batch of energy startups. Applications will open soon, so keep an eye out for new info on our web page.
We also plan to continue collaborating closely with the amazing #malmostartups and #CPHFTW communities and maintain a healthy mix of external and internal teams.
If you have an idea related to energy, sustainability or efficiency, don’t hesitate to get in touch. Follow us on Twitter to stay tuned!
