Our mission: getting you and your team balanced, in control and having fun.
How: by adding all expert power needed whenever needed.
For me bears don't exist. Yes, there can be challenges and sometimes huge ones. But there is always a way to go forward (sometimes with a step back, first).
I'm an entrepreneur for over 35 years. Some of my companies where a success (like www.Skiinfo.com) and some became a complete nightmare (like my eighties fashion adventure with Famous Clothing Company and Youp Accessoires). Learned a lot a long the way, especially about bad finance constructions and mismatch with partners. Love to share my lessons learned in order to help startups avoiding to make the same mistakes.
For over 15 years I'm involved in advising startups and scale-ups, directly, as co-founder of IncPlus incubator & fund and as an expert partner in programs like Ready2Scale and PIM NH.
Got more and more involved with and passionate about innovation in Healthcare. Together with my health expert partners we help innovation teams to speed up innovation development, setting up strong business models, assist with validation & implementation and advice in scaling up. Besides helping startups and scale-ups we also assist innovation managers in hospitals in order to improve their internal innovation organisation and processes and helping them in setting up co-creation partnerships with market parties (from startups to corporates). For that support we have a different program: www.pontesnl.nl
Besides above I always be an entrepreneur myself. I'm owner and/or shareholder in different companies.
"Innovation is like exploring mountains"
When I hike in the mountains the road is bumpy and the view is limited by the mountain I have to conquer. Having reached the summit and the view is clear I learn that there is a next mountain to be climbed before I may see the finish. Weather conditions may change unexpectedly making the hike exhausting and even risky but I trust my team, experience, preparation and tools.
As a concept thinker, creative ideation and realisation are my passions in 40 years of professional activities. As Industrial Design Engineer I worked for a coffee machine manufacturer for 12 years as R&D manager and learned that an innovative patentable idea is nice but realisation for serial manufacturing, maintenance and technical service is something different. Valuable learnings!
The next 11 years I was New Business Director at an Industrial Design Agency working with multinationals in the food industry developing innovative dispensers like e.g. a maintenance free draught beer system for Heineken, a Cup a Soup dispenser for Unilever and a Nespresso- like multi drink system for a startup. As inventor in the patents I assisted at the realisation until market introduction.
These projects were creative and the realisation technically challenging with satisfying results and a lot of fun. My internal drive however wanted to change my focus on innovation with more social relevance and impact. So I entered the medical innovation world in the University Medical Centre Utrecht, setting up a new department for realisation of innovative ideas of care givers and scientists called Pontes Medical, aiming to improve health care. Here I combined my learnings and experience on ideation, product development, project management, value proposition, business cases, stakeholder analysis, pilot preparation and implementation and developed formats for e.g. cooperation- and license agreements. With my team I used this so called Pontes method to assist idea owners and startups to realise their innovation and have impact resulting in 12 market launches.
As the Pontes method became famous nationally Joep and I were asked to set up PontesNL where we coach innovation teams in hospitals to realise innovative ideas. In The Health Impact House we put our effort on coaching of startups to help them realising their ideas.
