This story was migrated from our old blog, originally published on June 10th, 2021.
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This blog post first appeared first on old medium publication (https://medium.com/startuprad-io), and was moved to this blog with the relaunch of our website in summer 2024.
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The Founder
We interview Justin Gemeri, Founder and CEO (https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-gemeri/) of Frankfurt-based innovation platform ekipa (https://ekipa.de/en/).
The Startup
Ekipa offers a digital platform for startups, students, student teams and corporates to cooperate on innovation challenges, all in one place: https://ekipa.de/en/
The Video Interview is set to go live on Thursday, June 10th, 2021, at 17.00 CET
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The Interviewer
This interview was conducted by Jörn “Joe” Menninger, startup scout, founder, and host of Startuprad.io. Reach out to him:
Transcript
[0:00] Music.
[0:17] Live Events welcome everybody this is,from celebrated are all your startup podcast and YouTube blog from Germany as well as the world’s first internet radio station dedicated to startups and tech companies today we bring you another interviewin media partnership with Frankfort Valley you can pay them a visit ducked up Frankfort Valley Dot.And of course there is a link down here in the show notes,if you haven’t already done so make sure to hit the like And subscribe button leave us a nice comment and now let’s get ready for the interview I have guests here from Frankfort hey Justin are you did.
[1:01] Hey there I am pretty good thanks for having me I’m really glad that I’m here today how are you Joe.I’m doing great thank you as everybody who’s watching this on YouTube can tell very bright yellow pull over so it’s already starting to do to be a little bit.
[1:18] Spring feeling in here so everything’s totally fine except for a little bit hay fever butthat’s something you just have to deal with you are here because we got the connection through a Frankfort Valley and you doing something very interesting you’re helpingstartups companies and universities to work together but before we get into that tell us a little bit about what brought youto this stage of course is always your LinkedIn profile is link down here in the blog post as well andwhat is not included in the LinkedIn profile.
[1:57] Is that for example Lufthansa accepted you for pilot training and you did not take this.
[2:05] Tell us a little bit how this all unfolded in ended up in your startup ekipawell that’s that’s actually an interesting story and the already mentioned one interesting thing regarding my background in regarding my journey that brought me here so when I when I aim for finishing my school I,obviously asked myself what I wanted to do in my professional future and.And one of the things what I thought might be quite interesting was becoming a professional pilot and that’s when I when I applied for the pilot training at Lufthansa and and,indeed they accepted me and I went through the whole qualification phase and they said okay we want you to become one of our future Pilots but at the same time they also told me,did they stopped the training for the pilots for about two years and I needed to find something else something educational or maybe studying something,for yeah well as a bridge until I can start my pilot training and then I decided that I wanted to do or study something that I’m really interested in.My First Choice was to study international sports management here in a,the university nearby Frankfurt I applied for that as well and they told me okay maybe international sports management might not be the best fit since,and the job perspectives are not that great after you finish your bachelor degree in sports management and maybe you need to study something more General.
[3:28] So they recommended me that I study something not just full time studying but also working at the same time and that’s when I.Started to study and work and headhunting Company at the same time and worked as a Headhunter infect for about.Have a year almost a year I think and I found out that I didn’t really like the job to be a Headhunter and to call.1560 person’s everyday and tell them that I have maybe a new and exciting job for them so I decided to quit.And then since I didn’t have the chance yet to start my pilot training I went to good University,and I started my bachelor’s degree in economics and business administration or in German virtual systems,I’m pretty pretty General Degree I’m pretty Broad in the topics pretty much focus on Theory and not that much on practice that was.One of the reasons why I started my startup later we will talk about that later in the interview I think and after two semesters.I thought okay just studying isn’t isn’t what makes me really happy and I wanted to do something besides just studying and just my bachelor’s degree and I knew from from friends of mine and people who are studying with that you can.
[4:45] Join the student initiated the student organization at Curtin University and I took a look at them and thought about okay what might be interesting for me but I didn’t really find something where what I was really interested in regarding the topic or the focus that those,already existing student organizations hat and this was when I decided okay maybe.I want to found I want to create I want to start my own student organization and this was when I together with two friends of mine started to found an organization called impress.
[5:17] It wasn’t one of the typical student comes out and see it was more like a platform or an organization where people could learn and focus on their rhetorical and communication skills because this was something I already knew,could become quite important in your job and your professional life and also in your private life to present yourself and to learn how to talk to others but I knew that in fact.In your University degree no one was teaching you how to work on that skills and no one was helping you to yeah choo-choo train these.
[5:49] This was when we when he founded the organization and press and this is when we started to invite companies and managers of companies and speakers and professional,rhetoric trainers and coaches to our events to our workshops and we invited a lot of students from not just go to university but also of other universities nearby to come to those workshops and to work interactively,on their communication skills why am I telling this in so much detail because this was the first time when I thought.
[6:21] That building something that creating something that has a positive impact on others.
[6:26] Might be a great fit to my personal values into my personal goals in my professional life.So when me and and one of my former co-founders of the student organization Nico,when we talked about that and when we also talked about what we wanted to do after finishing our degrees.
[6:42] I’ve for my own actually decided that I didn’t want to to start the pilot training anymore at Lufthansa because I found out that.Creating something in building something that helps others seem to be a greater fit for me and then we decided that we wanted to create something that helps others.But that doesn’t necessarily have to do has to do something with Communications and rhetorical skills and that’s back then 2017 when we had the idea for a keeper.So after finishing our bachelor’s degree.We started our own startup journey and in the first couple of months we met each day in one small room in the apartment of my co-founder Nico.And we started to work on this idea now pretty fast forward three and a half years later we build a startup we build a company with currently about 20 employees.
[7:34] I have one little detour before we get into what you see but does where does the name come from.
[7:44] That is usually something that tells you a lot about the intention of startup founder so that’s why I’m asking plus my usual subscribers know that I’m the king of detours,yeah absolutely so before I tell you how we how we found the name I just wanted to tell you something else finding the right name for your own startup.Is really hard or at least has been really hard for us because we took about half a year.Until we finally decided that the keeper is going to be the name for what we are planning to do with.
[8:21] We had a couple of other names before we had the name Loom we had the name quick and some other really creative names.In the end we ended with a keeper and we had a couple of workshops also with friends brainstorming to find a fitting name.Ekipa has an a couple of other languages for example of the Croatian language has the meaning of team.
[8:42] For group also in the sports context for example ekipa as a team of sports for soccer team for example,and when we started with our idea our initial approach was that we wanted to create to match interdisciplinary teams on our own platform,to collaborate with each other to match and combine different skills different mindsets different backgrounds to develop great new innovative solutions for current problems and challenges and matching those teams the team,the team thought that the team aspect was one of our core aspects of our initial idea Nico has a Croatian background and then we said okay keep on might be a great name,I’m also the German domain ekipa. D e was still free to buy.And there was no registered brand and that time for a keeper and that’s when we decided okay we want to to call our startup ekipa,that is always very important to have like the website you have to Prime and stuff like that I would personally recommend everybody who’s.Who’s just starting out with and startup idea look for a cheap.
[9:49] Address for your website go with the name you can always later Rebrand when year,we know how to do it what your business will be how to pick up steam and stuff like that you don’t necessarily need,to spend like five digitsjust just for name is local and some printed marketing collaterals and awesome website and register Brandon yells the other things outfor example with it startupradio I’ve been working with other registered trademark for almost four years until I started the process of registering my trademark of European Union so.
[10:26] That’s basically how I was working started from the very beginning if you have VC fund it’s a different game but if you have to bootstrap.
[10:35] Go to cheap way I can totally agree on that point so we started to register the trademark after I think two yearsapproximately two years yeah you shouldn’t if your bootstrap as you mentioned before you shouldn’t pay that much money for the domain you otherwise you should you should look for names where you can get cheaper domains for,yeah this would be the better way and this was at least the way we had when we when we decided for ekipa,and URLs by themself I usually,not worth a lot don’t fall for the people who just reaching out to you when they realize you found it a newly company and tell you oh this year L is just awesome it will be just fifty thousand dollars.
[11:23] Don’t fall for itgo with the cheap look solution and then look what it what is working and there’s some examples with something just did not work for example there was a car called Novawhich never sold in an in Spanish-speaking countries because Novak is not going so it’s not working and you should keep that in mind in itthat is something you can test what you know where customers are locatedbut talk about customers and what you guys doing tell us a little bit how it Kibashe works for example let’s assume,I am a start-up founder you going to company website of course is always there to link down here in the show notes and.
[12:13] What can I expect and what is my journey yeah,it’s pretty easy so maybe I will just start by explaining how we came up with the idea and now what benefit we bring to our customers and to our different stakeholders so the idea already grew during our bachelor’s degree and basically wasbecause of a problem that we experienced on ourselves so when we study a good University and I mentioned that before we experience that was so much.Theoretical knowledge that you gained but there wasn’t that much practice there wasn’t that much really applying this knowledge and applying your own potential and,we found out a we thought okay this this young generation Our Own generation doesn’t have so much opportunities to unfold.Its own potential.And we wanted to provide our own generation on opportunity and platform where they can apply their knowledge and where can where they can unfold their own ideas.
[13:11] And this was our initial idea I don’t want to get too much into detail there because of course we iterated a lot and.We talk to potential customers a lot and we had some iterations there but in the end what we are offering right now is an open Innovation platform but not just that,but I always describe it as a framework within companies as back established big organizations.Can collaborate with the digital generation.And what I mean by that is that most of the time really big really established organizations are facing change they are facing upcoming challenges and problems.Especially in the topics of digitization of innovation of sustainability.Business models are changing rapidly customer needs are changing rapidly and therefore they have upcoming challenges that I need to face and that they need to find new solutions for.And from our point of view and there’s a huge Innovation potential within this digital generation.
[14:08] And by digital generation I specifically mean students startups researchers and young professional so the generation that grew up in times of digitization,it has a completely different or even better access to digital Technologies,it brings a completely new perspective to the to the table and most importantly that brings a really high commitment to change things.So we have two sites we have established organization organizations we have the young digital generation,and both of them are living in their own bubble so it’s not that easy to bring them together and to help them to collaborate with each other in the most effective way.
[14:50] So what we are doing is we are creating a framework via our own online platform open Innovation platform.Where we take specific challenges or topics or problem settings by big organizations.We transform them into so-called challenges.We put them on our platform and then we have a network a huge network of universities of innovation centers of research Institutes.And therefore this allows us to address specific Target groups be it startups in the area of 5G or,artificial intelligence it students in the topic or with a background of chemicals or B research groups and specific research topics and Fields and we address them with specific challenges.We bring them on our platform we match them into interdisciplinary teams that’s where our name also came from and then we accompany them.In the whole Innovation journey in the whole Innovation process.
[15:46] Starting from The Challenge that we provide via the idea generation process process where we support them with design thinking workshops and methods and so on.Over the validation of the most promising ideas app to the implementation of the execution of new Solutions so starting with challenges,coming over Target groups that we address that we bring on our platform.Until we accompany them and developing new Solutions new Innovations and bring them together with those organizations to make those Solutions.Become reality that’s basically what we’re doing and in this framework we are serving as a platform provider,as it comes out and see you and as a project manager that’s basically our three roles that we have within our projects and within all formats that we are conducting.
[16:35] I didn’t want to interrupt you when we eat you’ve put on the roll so when you said at the beginning you’ve been.Iterating how long did you take to iterate and what was the process,you’ve been using and then we might actually go into the customer Journey for startup,well actually if I’m honest with you I think we never stopped iterating.And I think if you would stop integrating you would stop with your progress as a start-up because you always need to focus on your customers and as I mentioned before customer needs are changing rapidly.And business models need to change with those customer needs with those changing customers so I would say that we never stop iterating or better,especially boots that started as we are never should stop iterating but making it more specifically when we started the idea we were just focusing on students,we were focusing on matching students within universities on our platform and accompanying them and guiding them to develop new ideas new creative.Marketing concepts for example and one of our biggest iterations was that or two of our biggest iterations were that on the one hand.
[17:54] We expanded our Target groups not just on students but also on now researchers startups and young professionals making,the solutions that are in the end of such an innovation project more tangible and more implementable in the end because startups,most of the time already have a prototype or an MVP that they can then fit to the needs of the challenge that we provided.
[18:20] And the other most important iteration from my point of view was that at the beginning we only offered one specific project format.Which consisted of two phases and ideation phase and an elaboration phase wherethe team started with an idea then the most promising ones were selected and then those selected teams iterated and elaborated on their solutions to make them implementable to the Prototype or an MVP.But meanwhile we realized that our clients so the big organizations that are facing those challenges and that they are paying us for supporting them giving them access to the digital generation guiding them to develop new Solutions.They do not necessarily always have the same needs so.
[19:06] Not all of those clients not all of those companies and organizations need such a project format with an ideation phase American elaboration phase not all the companies need a process that lasts for about four months.And that’s when we decided we want to offer different formats coming from our first Innovation Challenge format,now also offering and providing formats like Innovation days where we just bring together six to ten young highly talented innovators to collaborate into teams for one to two days together with representatives from the company.Also to bigger projects that we run together with several companies at the same time facing up to 12,challenges in one topic or in one field for example at the same time that’s the two most important iteration.
[19:59] Going away from just one product offering different products for different customer needs.
[20:05] That sounds pretty good and now we know what you guys are doing having Innovation challenges.From big companies that go out to startups to universities and to students how can start up register.On your website and what can they expect from doing that yeah.
[20:32] So it’s pretty easy you go on AB try to keep a dirty you’re just in your own startup within 30 seconds I guess you just write down your email address,password the name of the start of the industry or technology working in and that’s it and then you register and then we have a challenge overview page so that’s where startups can find,our current challenges,not every challenge is for startups always addressing startups as the main target group but currently we have about around for challenges addressing.
[21:01] Startups as the key Target group,they can go to one of those challenges each challenge has its own landing page where the challenge is described in more detail where the criteria for the submission and the solutions that the company is looking for is described in more detail.And it’s for startups especially it’s completely easy they go on the landing page of the challenge they click on the button to participate.They upload their pitch deck or a submission template that we provide on this challenge briefing landing page.That they need to fill they submitted before the deadline,and then if they’re being selected by the company it depends on the project but then they have the chance for example to start a pilot project,together with the organization that provide the challenge or two pitch,their own solution their own technology their own use case and front of the decision makers of the company that depends on the challenge but participating and receiving the benefits such as prize money pilot projects,collaboration with the organization or pitching in front of the decision-makers that just needs yeah depending on the challenge between 30 minutes and two hours of effort for start.
[22:14] I did use they’re not paid for it the startups.
[22:18] So for participating they’re not paid if they just submit their solution they are not paid at the same time it’s important for me to say that all the intellectual property property obviously stays at the start up all the time.But when they win the challenge if they get selected by a company they can get with get paid with prize money’s at the first hand.
[22:39] And afterwards on the midterm a long-term if they get coming project together with the company if they start a pilot project.They’re of course they are being paid by the company so for example whether you.
[22:51] Project with Deutsche Bahn the largest train organization in Germany one could say and therefore startups who are selected for running a pilot project,with Deutsche Bahn and each of those for startups received funding one could say about that not for Equity but just for this pilot project,for 25,000 each and this was quite a good deal for everyoneone of those startups now has a bigger Corporation with the Deutsche Bahn lasting for a couple of years so such a challenge can be a great starting point for a startup industry collaboration for exampleI see and we do have a lot of listeners,some viewers from the corporate side how would corporate approach you website what can they do,so the deal is with our with our business model it’s not possible it’s consciously not possible for companies to just go on our platform and start its own challenge because we think that.
[23:50] Especially in the open Innovation framework.It’s not a good approach to just start a challenge to just publish a question a problem setting a challenge on a platform is ours that’s where we decided that,collaborating with our community with our network with our crowd just goes via working with us and why are preparing such a challenge with us.So the easiest way would be to approach us me for example via LinkedIn and.And start just casting with us what a challenge what an innovation project with the digital generation could look like.
[24:24] If we find a feeling format and if you find a fitting question or challenge topic,inside the company then we Define a concept for the format we Define the target groups and then we publish The Challenge on our platform and then within weeks or months.Depending on the challenge and depending on the criteria and expectation that a company or the decision maker has we will find an average 40 to 60 teams student startups researchers and professionals.To provide first initial ideas first initial approaches to select from then usually select in six to eight most promising ones.Going more into detail with them elaborating on these ideas until they are on a prototype level and then deciding which ones you would like to continue with and then.It depends on the company some of them have their own Innovation Vehicles some of them already know how to accelerate prototypes and MVPs but some of them don’t.And then we also support them and help them and guide them in an acceleration process also sometimes in the go-to-market process where we.
[25:33] Create a framework between the winning teams of the challenge and the company that provided the challenge,to guide them to coach them and to help them to not just have an idea or prototype but a real world Innovation and the end and that’s,the outcome of most of our projects that the company at that had the challenge for example,has a new product has in your business model has a new digital application in the end or works together with a startup that won the challenge that already provides such a product or business model or application in the end.
[26:08] Sounds pretty good of course everybody can learn more,down here in the show notes will be linked to your company website as well as you like the profile and people installers can learnmove from there digging deeper into the problems into Solutions,well I would be interested in right now is what are you looking for like investors additional clients International network will be like the benefits you’re looking for from this interview.
[26:41] Yeah that’s a great question through thanks for asking so as I mentioned before we are bootstrap startup we are currently do not have any investors yet.
[26:49] I wouldn’t necessarily say that we are actively seeking for investors but we always open for talks and discussions what we more intensely looking for is for internationalisation because,especially in the last year in 2020we started to internationalize on our Innovative side on the digital generation sites and meanwhile we had some projects where we have participants,from more than 25 countries,coming from Asia are coming from Europe coming from the United States we had one challenge where the winning team was a start-up from the University of Harvard for exampleso this went quite well and now we are aiming for internationalisation also the client site so we are now we’ve now been working with some Global organizations like zum-zumlike some movie for example and we saw that we can deliver a huge impact for them so now we are aiming for becoming more and more International,working together with more and more International companies not just from Germany anymore.
[27:53] So if there are any International companies out there who are willing to work together with young people with a digital generation.Actively seeking for new solutions for new Innovations or for cultural change to bring its own employees together with young people to collaborate with.Feel free to get in touch and as I mentioned we already have a huge university Network internationally so why not expanding also on the client side.
[28:21] That it’s been actually pretty good words I’d like to.Thank you for being a guest and let us know how you guys doing.And of course everybody from a university student and start up a corporate they can go down here in the show notes and register on your company’s website thank you it’s been a pleasure to be here.Completely my pleasure thank you very much if you are a professional looking at the European startup scene Germany is a place you cannot miss.
[28:53] Music.
[29:05] Likely you have never heard or read anything only startups before in English but you will in the future be ahead of the curve and.
[29:13] Music.
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