Among the services DigitalWells Innovation Support can offer, a review according to KTH's model for Innovation Readiness is one of the most basic. Often it leads to companies that requested a service first getting help with something else - which they didn't know they needed.
The review is in principle mandatory for all entrepreneurs who have a more finished product or service and are looking for support to develop prototypes and to scale up. KTH Innovation Readiness Level assessment is a model that measures the maturity of an idea from different perspectives. By analyzing how far the company or entrepreneur has come in terms of, for example, technology, the market and legal issues, DigitalWell Arena's process manager can, together with the applicant, determine what the next step is.
Starts in six categories
A battery of screening questions places the company on a nine-point scale in six key categories, providing a comprehensive picture of where it stands. It is not unusual for a company that, for example, sought help with the development of a beta version to first receive help with something else, in order to then be able to take the next step in the development of the service itself.
- Many are, for example, good at the technical side and have a good dialogue with potential customers about the service. But they have often overlooked important areas, for example around intellectual property rights, or the development of their business model. You often need to sit down and write down the assumptions you've only had in your head so far, about, for example, how the market looks, or how you intend to charge, says Lina Svensberg.
So far, about ten entrepreneurs and companies have received guidance through KTH's model of DigitalWell Arena. One of them is Atwrk, which, together with employers, high schools, trade associations, property owners and housing companies, has since 2015 developed an educational app, with both theory and tests, that makes it easy to get it right when you're new to the job. Over 700 people have tested the app, which is available in Swedish, English, Arabic, Dari and Somali. The app also has two additional areas of use, one is niched towards those who are new employees in care and social care and one is aimed at tenants.
Jan Elofsson, CEO of Atwrk, thinks that KTH's Innovation Readiness model has been of great benefit to their company:
- It is a structured and clearly thought-out model that covers many areas of a company's development. We will greatly benefit from this in our continued work, says Jan Elofsson.
Provided legal insights
For Atwrk, the briefing resulted in them receiving legal support via a so-called expert hour, which in turn focused on important issues of intellectual property rights, and they were also helped to write an agreement to regulate the rights.
- Thanks to that, we got clarity on how it is connected with the fact that developers and others who have been involved must explicitly hand over the ownership of the existing intellectual property rights for the software, and that it is very important that this is done, says Jan Elofsson.
