Entrepreneurial Roots
+ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES was founded in 2013 by award winning startup founder, digital innovation veteran and entrepreneurship educator Vidar Andersen.
[...]one of the most important persons in the German startup scene.” – Wirtschafts Woche
Andersen started out in Norway as a professional in the digital innovation field in the mid nineties, at the beginning of the dotcom Web 1.0 boom (and subsequent crash) era. Along the way he co-created a web-based game that had millions of daily uniques featured on BBC Click Online, co-invented, crafted, pitched, and won the first multi-million contract at 24 years old for the (probably) first web-based Learning Management System in the world for the Norwegian Government and led its production, created and designed interactive eLearnnig for Big Oil & Gas, created and redesigned Intranets for large corporations like TeeKay and VG (the largest newspaper in Norway), and co-founding the highly successful enterprise content management system Plone (users include The FBI, The CIA, NASA JPL, and many more),
After moving to Germany in 2005, the last position he held in someon else's company was "Head of Digital" (2005 - 2010) at the lead agency to T-Mobile International, where he also served as a member of the board. In the course of those five years he e.g. built out the digital department, created internal web-based management tools (improving reporting, resource management, project management, etc) for the agency, regularly created executive whitepapers on emerging tech with implementation reccomendations and evaluated digtal project proposals from other agencies for management at T-Mobile International, led the launch of the Apple iPhone at the POS with T-Mobile in Europe, created & managed the development of backoffice tools (many based on Zope and Plone) for T-Mobile like a web-based central management system for Price Plans & Tarifs complete with internal business logic and rights management, a central digital multimedia Asset Production Management System (for animations, videos, and interactive POS apps), an internationalized tool for on-demand printing of POS offer material (with localized business logic, print-perfect CI compliance, and central statistics/monitoring), a central digital photo asset management systems for up to date and official images of products like mobile phones and accessories for all media, of note also pitched and won the dmexco (Europe's leading digital marketing & tech event) account and managed the original launch, and also managed digital projects for other well-known brands like DFL, DRK, and Nestlé Purina.
Later he also created things like the first real Social Discovery app for the iPhone, "Gauss - The People Magnet" (2011 - 2013), and "OneSec - An Instagram for One Second Videos" (just a couple of months before "Vine" launched).
His work has been featured and recognised around the world by the likes of New York Times, CNN, TechCrunch, Wirtschafts Woche, and Die Welt - and has been seen and used by billions by now.
As an educator and speaker on startup entrepreneurship, innovation, and digitalisation he has been invited to teach and speak from Stanford, Cambridge, University of Cologne, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Basel Switzerland, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Dokuz Eylul University Izmir in Turkey to Qazvin Islamic Azad University (QIAU) in Iran.
As a co-founder of Germany's largest startup pitching event, the Rheinland Pitch (2013 to date), he's trained over 3.000 startup founders and corporate innovators how to pitch with his "industry standard" Pitching Masterclass.
Because of his long and varied professional experience helping large international corporations and organizations like Statoil, TeeKay Shipping, Shell, Esso, Exxon, T-Mobile International, Deutsche Telekom, Lufthansa, The Royal Norwegian Government, The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research innovate and digitise processes since the mid 1990s, he realised that many (not all) of the new methodologies and best practices he had been picking up as a startup founder were also highly applicable to (or could be successfully adapted to) the corporate world.
Applying his first-hand experience from both sides of the table, in early 2013 he started researching other best practices from the venture capital and startup world, adapting them to a corporate innovation management setting, fine-tuning what worked and what didn't by running experiments together with customers, trying out different forms and versions of new innovation programs together with customers.
That is why +ANDERSEN is able to offer field-tested and proven innovation programs and processes that work for most companies in most industries, startup support programs, and educational institutions. Customers include dmexco, Deutsche Telekom, ABInBev, AXA, Philip Morris International, BMW Group, Bertelsmann, BARCO, Henkel, Yello Strom, Telefónica, Zentis, Vebego, Traveltainment, The Amadeus Leisure Group, Carlsen Publishers, International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), Mainzer Stadtwerke, and more iconic brands still under NDA.
