So little did I know when I came back to work at Compare at the end of January 2020... In less than three months, we within DigitalWell Arena's innovation council have processed applications from over 40 companies. Where over 70 support services of various kinds have been distributed and implemented by experts from nearly 20 different organizations.
After a long parental leave, I saw an intense spring ahead of me. I had been given a new area of responsibility – entrepreneurship, commercialization and scale-up. It was within a new major initiative, the DigitalWell Arena, which had started during my absence.
The newspapers wrote about a virus that caused pneumonia in China, and at Compare we were busy planning for spring. Lots of trips, events and meetings were planned, to gather input for DigitalWell's Innovation Support, which I was tasked with shaping. The idea was to experiment with various support services and processes during the spring and then "go live" after the summer.
Then came March. We wondered if it was really responsible to organize a group trip to Oslo Big Data day a week later, given the virus. I was going to give a lecture on "Innovation through Collaboration" and had started to think about what to talk about. I hadn't even worked two months in my new role, and felt unsure if I had enough relevant and current examples to talk about. But there was no conference. On the date of the event, the border with Norway was already closed, for the first time since the Second World War. The world was turned upside down. It began to dawn on us, just like everyone else, that we were about to experience something that, just a week before, did not exist in our conceptual world.
At Compare, just like at all other actors in the business support system, intensive discussions immediately began about how we could best support all the companies and innovators who needed our help. DigitalWell and DigitalWell Arena received two million from the project budget to be used for business support activities in the Corona crisis, and it was decided that this investment would be run within the framework of the Innovation Support, which then needed to "go live" in a hurry. We were given a week to do a job that was supposed to take several months. Create an innovation council with representatives from the university, the region, Karlstad municipality and Almi, which could process the applications. Create a network of support service providers, build a website, develop application criteria and forms, develop confidentiality agreements and supplier agreements...
Everyone involved inside and outside of Compare was ordered to put all other work aside and roll up their sleeves!
A week later we released the news. Two million to Innovation power in the corona crisis, and presented the new website. We quickly realized that we were in many ways in the same boat, both we who worked with Innovation Support, the entrepreneurs who sought support from us, and our suppliers of expert services. For startups, working to find a way forward in uncertain circumstances is commonplace, but now, when the whole world was uncertain, it suddenly applied to all of us, regardless of the type of business. The word entrepreneur comes from the French entreprendre, which means to undertake or carry out something, and we all needed to bring out our inner entrepreneurs and act in almost startup-like conditions.
We simply had to help each other. The entrepreneurs themselves had to propose which support services they needed. The providers of expert services were given free rein to design their own support services. The members of the innovation council had to set up their own criteria that they themselves, each one, thought they needed, in order to assess the applications. We tested, evaluated, screwed and tested again. And everything in sharp mode.
In less than three months, the innovation council processed applications from over 40 companies. Over 70 support services of various kinds were distributed, and carried out by experts from nearly 20 different organizations. And I got to be part of a clearer example of entrepreneurship, and Innovation through collaboration than I could have ever imagined. My hope for the future is that even when we reach the new normal, a sense of business as usual, post-corona, that we can still bring out the entrepreneurship that exists within all of us, regardless of the type of organization we operate within. And sometimes put everything else aside to create together Innovation through collaboration.
