IdeaHub Innovation Challenge – the journey continues

Thank you for the interest in ABB and the IdeaHub Innovation Challenge!

A few months ago we announced the IdeaHub Innovation Challenge, a global competition seeking to transform the role of variable speed drives (VSDs) in an industrial setting in terms of simplicity, connectivity and intelligence of VSDs.

Almost a hundred applications received

We received almost a full hundred applications and are thankful for the high quality of proposals and the time you have taken to engage with us. These applications will keep us busy over the next weeks. We will reach out for more information and will schedule a lot of video interviews during February. Then as a next step, we will engage a fair amount of experts and managers in ABB organization to have their views on relevance and fit of your solutions in ABB Drives offering. Based on analysis and review results we will select ten finalists to pitch their business and solution to ABB Drives management in a day-long session in London, UK on April 20^th.

Our three challenge themes – simplicity, intelligence and connectivity received a fairly balanced amount of proposals; 42%, 28% and 30% respectively. Two thirds of proposals came from Europe, North America being second largest source of proposals with 19% share followed by South America and Asia both with around 5% share.

Let’s write the future. Together.

All finalists can see themselves as winners. Numbers of offers made to the finalists is not limited in advance and the ABB offers may include market access, product and lab access, venture support and mentoring or equity investment under terms and conditions to be agreed case by case.

Very often successful new ventures speak about their hockey stick curves. If you’ve read books like Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup or Ash Maurya’s Scaling Lean, you’ve come across the fact that when starting something new, new business or product launch, you start small and aim high. But nothing scales from a good idea into billion dollar business overnight. These great authors suggest you want to time box your experiments and validate your value and growth hypothesis as early as possible and measure your progress through traction, not overall cumulative gross trends because these seldom help you answer what to do next.

This is our attitude on way forward. We are willing to work together and continuously validate hypothesis for value and growth in time-boxed, agile and results oriented way. We want to see customer traction and we want to benefit while you make your hockey stick curves real!