Home - Verhaert Innovation Academy

Commercializing innovation

Why?

Idea owners are typically passionate about their solution but might lack the competence to launch the solution into a profitable and robust revenue stream. This training aims to bridge the gap and build business champions out of innovators. The best results are obtained when participants have an active case to work on.

What can you expect?

▪️ Go-to-market planning
▪️ Business model design
▪️ Sales strategies
▪️ Financing strategies
▪️ Growth & expansion strategies
▪️ Talent attraction strategies
▪️ Business planning
▪️ Team building

What output will you have?

☑️Effective go-to market plans for real cases
☑️A firm understanding of all aspects related to a successful launch
☑️Broadly upskilled innovators, ready to take on a new challenge or career move

Innovating the core

Why?

Innovation efforts should not only focus on transformational moonshot ventures, but also deliver bottom-line profit for companies on the short term, especially in times of recession and crisis. In this course we aim to increase awareness of finding opportunities within the core through customer-centricity and operational excellence thinking.

What can you expect?

▪️Innovating in times of crisis
▪️Design thinking
▪️Jobs to be done
▪️End-user profiling
▪️Con & divergent thinking
▪️Building trust with customers
▪️Passion drivers for growth
▪️Running customer interviews

What output will you have?

☑️Detect and prioritize important stakeholder & customer needs
☑️Discover and apply methods & tools for contextual research
☑️Think business, drive business

Managing Innovation

Why?

Making innovation successful requires a diligent approach to de-risking opportunities and building a vision for a portfolio and pipeline approach. This training is perfect for any team leader or manager who wants to sharpen their innovation management capabilities. The e-course is delivered by Verhaert’s senior heroes and delivers a free-to-use toolkit.

What can you expect?

▪️Innovation strategies
▪️Innovation stages
▪️Different PMMs compared
▪️Dealing with risk and uncertainty
▪️Setting up innovation teams
▪️Designing a project approach
▪️Communicating progress
▪️Innovation accounting

What output will you have?

☑️ Resilient project managers, anticipating on common pitfalls with methods & tools
☑️ A sound basis on the theoretical overview of project management methodologies
☑️ Fresh mindset through peer interaction on the ins and outs of innovation project management

Accelerating R&D

Why?

Within R&D, the daily business run in a ‘first-time-right’ mindset, leading to considerable de-risking processes and prolonging the time to insight and time to market. Developing innovations requires a different approach, focusing more on iterative learning, a customer-centric point-of-view and multidisciplinary decision making.

What can you expect?

▪️Lean start-up
▪️Quali/quantitative R&D
▪️End-user profiling
▪️Assumption mapping
▪️Running lean experiments
▪️Preto/prototyping
▪️Evidence-based decision
▪️Business case mindset

What output will you have?

☑️ Big picture thinking: A more effective allocation of R&D resources and attention
☑️A changed view on risk: From risk control to risk intelligence to opportunities
☑️An upgraded toolbox and methods at your disposal to manage risk holistically

Gen AI for innovation

Why?

The age of generative AI has begun, and it opens incredible new opportunities for innovators. Some investigative or concept creation tasks will be executed thoroughly in a different way in the future and innovators that use AI tools will outperform those who don’t. This course provides an intro in the technology and focuses on use cases for innovation professionals.

What can you expect?

▪️Future impact projections
▪️Main domains and applications
▪️Trend & tech scouting with AI
▪️Creating effective prompts
▪️Build concept & prototypes with creative AI
▪️Validate opportunities with creative AI
▪️Getting started with ChatGPT
▪️Getting started with Midjourney

What output will you have?

☑️ Awareness on (future) opportunities from generative AI in innovation
☑️ Trained staff to optimize generative AI output through prompt engineering
☑️ Practical insights on 10 leading platforms and applications

Jan Kennedy, Founder

Location: Munich
Speaks: English, German
Specialty: World of Corporate Entrepreneurship
Fact: Created 1 Billion Dollars of Value as Intrapreneur at Intel

Jan Kennedy is an expert for Intrapreneurship program design. As founder of Academy for Corporate Entrepreneurship (AfCE) he overseaw the design and implementations of various Intrapreneurship Programs covering different stages of the Innovation Process for many Fortune 500 organisations. He is also a Director at the Founder Institute, the world’s largest mentoring program for early stage entrepreneurs launching over 1,000 companies per year with a 72% survival rate.

Born in Germany, grown up in the UK and lived and worked in Silicon Valley, Vienna, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Munich, Jan loved working with AfCE’s team of diverse global mentors. He can be found on stage at Intrapreneurship or Innovation Conferences or down in the trenches with corporate startup teams testing and validating critical assumptions. Jan also runs an investment fund focused on startups and crypto currencies.

Fill out the form below to download your innovation programs brochure

Fill out the form below to download your innovation courses brochure

Narjeet Soni, Product Development Director

Location: Berlin
Speaks: English
Specialty: Agile Product Development

Narjeet is a a serial entrepreneur with his latest start-up valued at € 1.5 mil within 2 years. He is the founder and CEO of Lean Apps GmbH and acts as Head of Product Development at AfCE where he supports all of our participating teams with the AfCE Prototype Fund and Incubation Development Fund. He was also a Scrum Master at Infosys and Adidas.

Currently, he is focused on helping companies go through their Digital Transformation journey. Narjeet has been working with startups to learn, the ways of working that keep them agile and fast paced and has been implementing those learnings in the enterprise. He has successfully implemented Lean Innovation in Retail, Automotive and Insurance companies and has worked as an Agile Coach, Product Owner, Project Manager and Business Consultant as well as a Software Engineer at various Retail and Telecom customers.

Aernout van Heusden, Business Development Director

Location: Madrid
Speaks: English, Spanish, Dutch, German
Specialty: Business Development
Fact: Been living and working outside the Netherlands for more than 25 years

Dutch born and a Spanish resident since 1999, with a wealth of experience in International Business Development & Sales within various industries and (mainly EMEA) countries. Senior background as entrepreneur, director, and as independent consultant having done projects (70% of those relating to Business Development and Sales) with start-ups till established multinationals.

Networker, public speaker, tech (SaaS, PaaS, Mobile, AR, Smart City) savvy, structured and loves working on solving company pain points.

Maria Isabel Becerra-Noll, Finance Manager

Location: Munich, Germany
Speaks: English, Spanish, German, French
Specialty: Finance manager
Fact: Worked for the company that produced the Netflix series “Narcos”

Maria Isabel has more than 10 years of experience as Financial Analyst and Business Development Manager in a wide variety of industries. She is originally from Colombia, where she was born and raised. She has lived in Paris, Boston and now Germany. Maria Isabel holds an MBA from Babson College, the number one school for Entrepreneurship in the world.

Before moving to Germany in July, 2018, Maria Isabel worked in Bogota as Business Development Manager for the world’s largest infrastructure company, VINCI. In this role she was responsible of searching new concession projects and leading Due Diligence processes to acquire new concessions. Before this she worked for another infrastructure company, as well as a film production company and a marketing agency.

Maria Isabel is passionate about finance and numbers, enjoys working in teams and seeing the results of hard work.

Stijn Smet, Managing Director

Location: Antwerp (BE)
Speaks: English, Dutch
Specialty: Innovation strategy and program design
Fact: Performed live on stage in front of 30.000 people

Stijn is an expert in innovation strategy & management. He consults various R&D and C-suite leaders in designing their innovation program and underlying governance structures. As the Managing Director at AfCE, Stijn can build on his pragmatic experience of heading corporate accelerator programs at Fortune500 clients.

With over 12 years of experience in innovation consulting, he has been leading Verhaert’s business innovation team where organizations and intrapreneurs were supported in developing their breakthrough products and services, from ideation all the way to market launch.

Stijn is a regular speaker at innovation conferences and co-authored the book Building Tomorrow, a pragmatic and systematic approach to tackling innovation challenges in the public sector.

Are you facing any challenges when it comes to your innovation strategy and program?

Interactive, online
innovation courses

Customizable, scalable
innovation programs

Interactive, online
innovation courses

Customizable, scalable
innovation programs

Interactive, online innovation courses

Customizable, scalable innovation programs

Interactive, online innovation courses

Customizable, scalable innovation programs

Interactive, online
innovation courses

Customizable, scalable
innovation programs

Interactive, online
innovation courses

Customizable, scalable
innovation programs