Susanne Fuglsang - Innovation Catalyst
Susanne Fuglsang is Innovation Catalyst and COO at Innovation Pioneers in Stockholm. She joined MTF Director Andrew Dubber to discuss innovation and interdisciplinarity - not just as nebulous concepts and buzzwords, but as a set of concrete steps and tools that can be applied and managed.
They discuss the trouble with hackathons, the value of co-creation, why Stockholm is both a capital for innovation and a city of social equality (and what connects those two things) and also how organisations can create a long-term innovation strategy.
AI Transcription
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
hackathon, innovation, people, company, stockholm, create, susanne, tech fest, organisations, ideas, sweden, mindset, mtf, internally, meeting, thought, ceo, tool, society, means
SPEAKERS
Susanne Fuglsang, Andrew Dubber
Andrew Dubber
Hi, I’m Dubber. I’m the director of Music Tech Fest, and this is the MTF podcast. Now, MTF is all about innovation and especially interdisciplinary innovation. We put music at the centre of everything, mainly because it’s the one thing that can bring everyone together and act as a kind of social glue. It’s the thing that everyone can agree is interesting, and it’s a leaping off point for artists, scientists, academia and industry to all work together. The innovation is key, the music, the thing we all love, is how we get there. When MTF moved its base to Stockholm last year, one of the first names that came across our radar was Susanne Fuglsang. She’s someone who thinks as much as we do about innovation, and interdisciplinarity not just as nebulous concepts and buzzwords, but as a set of concrete steps and tools that can be applied and managed. She’s the CEO of innovation pioneers, with clients ranging from Volvo and IKEA to Pernod Ricard, Ericsson, and tetrapack. I met up with Susanne for coffee at a Stockholm office. And we chatted about the trouble with hackathons, the value of cocreation, why Stockholm is both a capital for innovation and a city of social equality and what connects those two things, and also how organisations can create a long term innovation strategy. It was a really fascinating conversation for me with a lot of familiar themes that I’ve encountered in MTF and particularly from working with MTS founder Michela Magas. It was great to spend a little bit of time with Susanne Fuglsang, and I hope you’ll enjoy. So I’m sitting here with Susanne Fuglsang and you are very active in innovation in Stockholm. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?
Susanne Fuglsang
Yeah, I, I have the latest five years been working with what I call as as an innovation catalyst. Because primarily, primarily, what I do is that I create meetings between different disciplines so they can co create together. And it has been, from the beginning, it was around hackathons and the format of hackathons to create the interdisciplinary connections between academia and, and startups and organisations in social impact and companies. But from there, it went to actually having a whole network of innovation leaders from big companies. So what I do now is that I am creating meeting places for for my 50 members, which the company is called innovation pioneers, which is a 10 year old company that is, I haven’t found it, I took this assignment this year. But now I’m running it. And it’s about learning and sharing innovation capabilities with each other. So my 50 members actually do that. And what I do is I produce for tank meetings and one summit a year so they can meet and co create and share knowledge
Andrew Dubber
is this people from different sectors, from education from industry,
Susanne Fuglsang
it’s very, very broad. So it’s, we try to cover as much as we can from the innovation ecosystem. So we have academia from rice, for example, or research. And we have governmental agencies with us. And we have, of course, big companies like Volvo and IKEA. We have small startups also, like performance gates. So it’s a it’s a very broad membership base. But but it’s mostly a bigger companies in that sense, because they are the ones who actually need to learn and have benchmarking knowledge with the soul. So the bigger company, the more need, of course, but there the beauty of this is that you also need it when you’re a small company, of course. So they learn from each other.
Andrew Dubber
To the bigger companies find innovation hard.
Susanne Fuglsang
I think everyone found finding innovations hard because it’s easier said than done. But what what’s amazing is that in Sweden, we are very generous. So I’ve been blown away by the by the power in the meetings we have because we they do share a lot with each other. So they kind of empower each other which is really incredible. Because it could be like You know what, you don’t want to say anything because you just want to listen and learn from the other but but it’s not like that. It’s totally, uh, you know, open.
Andrew Dubber
A lot of people talk about innovation at the moment and the fact that it’s it’s everywhere in everything. How do you define it
Susanne Fuglsang
for for me And really it’s about taking idea into the stage of validating it and commercialising it. So when it’s out in the market, it’s certainly an innovation in my world.
Andrew Dubber
So just inventing something, or coming up with an idea is not innovation
Susanne Fuglsang
is not definitely not understood.
Andrew Dubber
So you’re in a place. I mean, you’ve talked a little bit about where we are, but very much connected with creativity and music and these sorts of things. How does that fit into your world?
Susanne Fuglsang
I think it’s basically around the fact that fashion, music, food, health, everything goes in together, because it’s not about specific brushes that they won’t want to innovate. It’s all brushes. And the beauty of this is that it’s even better if you’re not in the same area. And when you when you talk about innovation, because I mean, of course, you have to develop your own products within your own company. But if you when you talk about innovation, it’s mainly about giving, getting new perspectives. So when you’re in a co creating place like this at Alma, you, you can kind of just stumble upon those talents, and those companies. So it’s not that. But he’s also, of course, he gives us a lot of energy to be here. But for our members, it doesn’t really matter, because because we create other meeting places. But for us as a company, we believe it’s good to be in in other contexts, like in other contexts like this. Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
So you say you came in as essentially the leader of this organisation at this sort of 10 year old company, from where, What’s your story? How and how did you come in? And what qualifies you to be sort of the leader of innovation here in Stockholm?
Susanne Fuglsang
What was it that the most important thing is that I’m not a leader of, of innovation, I’m the leader of the network that that enhances innovation. So I am never the the actual reason for innovation, to become innovation. I am the enabler of that. So that’s why I call myself a catalyst, it’s all about creating the right atmosphere and the right processes. So the true heroes of innovation can come and innovate together. So, so that’s my role. But my background is a mindset of being endless, creative, curious, of not really fitting in anywhere, about searching for that context, where you could actually always be the one who always were looking for, for new, new insights and new perspectives. So for me, it was a kind of a journey to find innovation as my home base. Because that matched my mindset. 100%. So it wasn’t until I was 45, that I actually found my unique context. Because I’ve been in marketing for for a long time for like, 15 years before that. And that was as close I could come. But it wasn’t really what I was looking for. But when Technology and Society kind of met, and it became the focus on being being you had to have this mindset of surely adapting to change, then suddenly, my my kind of personality, failure writing. So I found the format of hackathons four, five years ago, and I fell in love with that. And I was really good at that. And what I was good at it was to, to, to make people creative together. So it was about listening a lot to make people work together, and then to create the safe environments to cooperate. And the top is worse. So amazing is you know, I’ve been working with NASA for open data, where you, you know, use space data to create new services on Earth, or I’ve been working with social impact projects, like reach for change, you know, to have ideas around new services in African countries. I’ve been doing, you know, for the stock of city with open data. I’ve been able to work with the food industry and the milk industry, whatever it is, and I did a brainathon where we work with the the the brain research from the big. What do you say? It’s called. I don’t know the English name for a bit, but it’s the university where you get to be a gymnastic teacher and stuff like that. So the topic has been amazing. And I learned so much. And it’s all about creating a better society. So it can be better, you know, you can be engaged in very, very advanced topics. But yet you can work with what you think is fun, meaning enable people to be created. One of the criticisms of
Andrew Dubber
hackathons is often that people sit around, they do 24 hours, and they drink all the red ball and they they have a good time. And they think really amazing things. But when they finished, the projects get left on the floor, the they go off to the pub and congratulate themselves on how clever they are, but nothing happens. And you were saying that to you, innovation doesn’t happen until it becomes what how do we bridge the gap between what i
Susanne Fuglsang
think i, because it’s so good as you ask a question, because one of the the most annoying things I know is people talking about hackathons that haven’t really even been on one, or understands how the process is used is how it’s used nowadays. So from if you go back five years, then hackathon or even 1015 years, then hackathons was about mainly guy sitting in a in a, whatever kind of location and just programming and hacking new stuff. But it’s gone. It’s gone so long beyond that. And so what it is now, and the only thing I have been working with the last couple of years is is a it is a tool for companies to use internally to, to co create with other perspectives, meaning their own ecosystem, and then having a long term innovation strategy where that processes fit in. So it’s not about an event, it is about a tool that they use, on and on again. But they they have it in their toolbox. So it’s not about it’s gone from that event to toolbox within their innovation strategy. So what I do, what I’ve been doing the last couple years is to help clients either start that innovation, long term strategy, where hackathon has been one of the tools, but it is it nowadays, it’s a lot of it’s like when you Everyone wants to have an opinion about it, but they don’t really understand what it is about. So I get really frustrated when I hear people say, Well, well, there’s always a lot of fun on a hackathon. But like you say nothing comes out of it. And and I believe that’s the truth. If you handle it like a one time event, that is what that is what happens. But the company that I work with, they see it as a tool for their innovation strategy. So it means what happens after the hackathon is one thing, meaning they actually have a process to take care of the ideas that comes out, they validate it, and they prototype it, and after that they test it, and then they actually implement it. So it’s not about the event. And but I also often hear that, so I’m starting to really feel that I need to go out there and tell people it’s it’s so much more than that.
Andrew Dubber
And these events, they build this tool, I guess they used internally within a company for their staff,
Susanne Fuglsang
it can be used both. So it you it’s now used both as an internal tool where you actually get the company together as a whole, in meaning that you can bridge all the different business areas and the different levels of people from from management that if you want to see it as a level but but it is about getting that intrapreneurship kind of mindset into the companies, because one
Andrew Dubber
of the other main criticisms of hackathons that you often hear is that big companies do these kind of when we’re holding a hackathon come and bring us your ideas, essentially. And then we’ll take those ideas and make money from them and maybe give you a cash prize. But yeah, but you don’t own the IP. And even there are there are contracts, some businesses that say, you know, you do our hackathon, we own your ideas. How do you address that kind of IP issue?
Susanne Fuglsang
I think, you know, that’s, it’s entitled kind of criticism. So what I tried to do or was when I meet the new client, if if it if it is about a hackathon, I Oh, I’m very eager to tell them that, you know, you can have a view about using people in this you have to have a really, you have to have a process you have to think about how to handle the IDS afterwards. And 99% of what I do is always open source, so it means you can’t own anything after this event. So it means that everyone owns everything. And but there’s also other products where you’re right on on than your side. And they, and that’s how you saw the IP issues, because it is all about transparency. But I do agree that companies have the misjudged misjudgments when it comes to using the format, even internally, that they kind of think it is about, you know, we can just do this as a fun thing. And then, but I would never recommend that to a company. So when I have assignments, I always tell them, you have to treat this really, in a manner that the staff feels that you have a long term thought about it, and you have to think about the rewards afterwards. And the rewards cannot be like a prize money, it has to be about empowerment on that of themselves, and you know, their own education and their own, you know, way of developing, and then it’s about a ignore issue. And that is what happens now, I get clients from the HR departments and the CEOs. And that’s how it should be treated, it should not be treated as like, like a fun party. I mean, it’s still refining. If people do that, I can’t forbid anyone to do that. I love them too. But I don’t want people to think that’s the only way you use a hackathon. Because a hackathon is just a name for a design thinking process. And if you understand that, you can really you know, criticise criticise it as an event because then it’s just scientific kind of process that you can implement whenever you want to.
Andrew Dubber
And you say that your experience in Sweden or Stockholm, specifically is that companies are very generous,
Susanne Fuglsang
very generous when it comes to, they can be a bit naive also, and the naivety comes in about thinking that everyone wants to come and contribute. So that’s where the naivety comes in, then I have to really say that it’s you can not expect people to come and give you two days, or whatever the hackathons length is, and they will get nothing. It’s but it is about the long term involvement, what what are they getting out of it. And since stock on especially, has been a very, very popular city of using hackathons, we are overwhelmed with hackathons in Stockholm. So that’s why we also I think, had this opposite effect that people feel a bit used. But I’m not one of those who contributes to that user kind of knowledge. I always, we even pay people to come to hackathons. If that’s the case, we think it’s better.
Andrew Dubber
What is it about stock on the stock has two reputations on the scary one is that it’s the innovation capital of the Western world. And the other one is that it’s their slogan, it’s a woman’s place, that it’s a very gender equal and welcoming and, and, and thinks about these things like diversity and equality and those sorts of things. What is it about stuff on them, that makes it possible where they come from?
Susanne Fuglsang
I think the easy answer to that is that that we have a culture of we are not a higher hierarchical society. So we have this more, where the organisations are more equal. That in turn, that translates into that. When you talk about innovation, and creating new stuff, people, you know, it’s not hard to get a meeting with a CEO in Sweden, or whatever title you have, it’s not impossible, you know, it’s you can simply form them if that’s the case. But for example, I have experienced from working with South Korea, where it’s impossible to even you know, have a talk with a CEO. So it means that we have a mindset in in Sweden, that we are equal, meaning that we can have connections with all levels in in our organisation. And it also helps because we have, we have come quite far when it comes to equality, even though we have a lot to work on still. But so it means that all of those things together, makes it so much more easier to get access to knowledge that you need. But we also have the actual ecosystem that supports that. So we have the, you know, the financing of from governmental agencies, and we have financing from VCs or crowdfunding or we have all those, you know, what to call it and the things that you need to be entrepreneur in Sweden, we have access to it’s easy to start a company. I would say it’s it’s a combination of an open society of a kind of gender equality society. Together with that we have access to capital quite quite easily and to knowledge
Andrew Dubber
And you mentioned interdisciplinarity. Before that, that’s a really important thing for for innovation. You want to say a little bit more about that. Because when I think of, you know, sort of a traditional hackathon, like you said, it’s it’s engineering guys in a room coding, the sorts of things, what’s the value of bringing in different perspectives in that respect for you,
Susanne Fuglsang
that the thing I have experienced is the most magical thing is, is on different levels. The first level, if, if you do an internal hackathon, then it’s the magic is around, that the finance department sits with the customer service departments and the CEO, or whatever are the kind of departments there are, and they actually co create together for for something that is a challenge that they all work towards. So it’s the magic of the feeling that you, you get to know people that you wouldn’t have known. And it also a bit of feeling that you you are involved in the company’s actual development. But it’s mainly about people. So it is about the force of people meeting over borders, which is crazy, magical. And, and that’s what the process makes. So in the in the long term, it’s about having a more inclusive work environment. That’s what the process gives. But of course, it should also give some kind of idea that they actually can implement. That was the internal thing, that when it comes to doing a hackathon, which most of my clients do, when you actually include other perspectives outside the company, then it is about that, the ideas get so much more interesting, because it is from perspectives that you internally would never think about. So the magic there is realising that you actually contribute more when you don’t have all the, you know, politic, internal stuff hanging on your shoulders. And when you actually can feel free to just say whatever you want to in a safe environment. So that’s what makes it so incredibly useful that you have ideas that you would never never think about. Because you are so restricted within your own kind of thought process. So that so that’s them. Once again, it’s about people, but it’s also about, you know, having other insights that you wouldn’t have thought about internally. What would
Andrew Dubber
you say is your connection to Music Tech Fest?
Susanne Fuglsang
It’s it’s been mainly through Michela but and and the reason I fell in love with both Horan and the Music Tech Fest is because you do what I think is the most necessary thing in society today. It is about bringing technology and creative people together. Because that’s when when we can really have the best solutions, I would say. And it’s the same in in the environments I work with. It’s all about co creating and finding the best solutions for things and and i think technology as a driver is so important. But it’s still about the people’s use of that. And that’s what you do you create that intersection. And I want to create the intersection for for similar causes, but more for, like business solutions. So that our relationship is that I’m a big fan.
Andrew Dubber
So what are you most proud of that you’ve done while you’ve been here?
Susanne Fuglsang
It is about the magic that I create that when people meet that that’s what I’m most proud of. I know that they they go home from our tent like tank meetings and summits a bit more. They know a bit more and they have more support within their own work environment.
Andrew Dubber
Susanne, thanks very much for your time. Thank you. Susanne Fuglsang, innovation catalyst and COO at innovation pioneers in Stockholm. And that’s the MTF podcast. If you’ve enjoyed please like, share, subscribe. And if you’re listening in overcast, which is my favourite podcasting app, there’s a little star icon clicking on that will help other people find us and we’d really appreciate it. Hope you have a great week. Cheers.
