The Munich-based startup Innosabi was founded a good nine years ago to bring crowd innovation to companies. Starting with consulting services and a crowd innovation platform, Innosabi has now transformed into a solid SaaS company. The founding team explains why openness and speed are so important for a startup, what has changed, why Innosabi prefers bootstrapping, and what being "always in beta" means to the team.
Munich Startup: Not only have you evolved into a SaaS company, but you're now also using machine learning and artificial intelligence to make the data on your platforms even more usable for innovation projects. What do your customers most demand?
Innosabi: The transition to a SaaS company was the biggest and most important change in our history to date. It was no less draining and energy-consuming, but it laid the foundation for our successful development. Building on this, we're going even further: We want to provide the digital infrastructure for connecting all relevant stakeholders in the ecosystem.
Companies are past the "pioneer" days of digital initiatives and innovation methods, and they have now successfully established many programs. The next step is a solution that connects these initiatives, makes them accessible, and discoverable—a kind of "operating system for innovation." This is what our customers are asking for. a central contact point for innovation in its own ecosystem, the “One-Stop-Shop-for-Innovation”Whether it's co-creation and prototype testing with customers, rapid identification of relevant innovation ideas and their implementation together with employees, or the early integration of suppliers' specific knowledge: Innosabi enables companies to accelerate their innovation processes through networking and thus actively shape the future.
Innosabi also helps to identify startups for innovation processes
Munich Startup: What is the specific benefit of your software for startups?
Innosabi: Startups often have minimal knowledge and information asymmetries due to their smaller size, flatter hierarchies, and short communication channels, allowing them to act quickly and agilely. Corporations, on the other hand, find this somewhat more difficult due to their sheer size and historically evolved structures. The Innosabi software is therefore primarily aimed at large companies, providing them with the tools to optimally map their innovation processes.
With our software, companies create a central hub for all innovation processes within their ecosystem. They can search specifically for new technologies, experts, patents, trends, or even startups. This opens the door to collaboration and exchange between startups and large corporations: The startups' solutions and ideas can be quickly and easily brought into the company, and current challenges can be solved jointly. This allows for optimal combination of resources, creating entrepreneurial opportunities for both sides.
“Always in beta”
Munich Startup: How do you keep up with trends?
Innosabi: No one can predict the future. But there are still ways to stay on top of trends. The right attitude toward the future plays a key role here. We are open and curious about the future. The future is something we want to actively shape and improve. For us, that means being "always in beta." We want to be bold, try new things, learn every day, and evolve.
The environment you operate in is equally important. When you're in constant dialogue with an innovative network, new ideas and input arise almost automatically. The constant exchange with our customers and other visionaries has enabled us to develop our product closely aligned with the market's requirements and needs and allows us to adapt quickly to current developments.
Openness as the basis for successful corporate development
Munich Startup: What have been the biggest challenges in recent years? How have you dealt with them?
Innosabi: We've experienced a significant growth spurt, especially in the last three years. While we're very pleased about this, it's also presented us with challenges. Above all, it's important to find the right balance between giving the necessary attention to new team members without neglecting the rest of the team. Collaboration at Innosabi is guided by the motto "Celebrate Individuality." This means that everyone should be given the opportunity to contribute their own personality to the best of their ability. We naturally want to live up to this principle.
With each new team member, new and unique perspectives are added to the team. This offers enormous potential, but also brings with it a new dynamic, which requires a high degree of adaptability and openness within the organization. This isn't always easy, but for us, it's something that is simply one of the basic requirements for successful corporate development.
How agility, interdisciplinarity and onboarding work together
Munich Startup: What was your biggest learning from this?
Innosabi: The biggest lesson is: Yes, we want to grow, but we don't want to overwhelm the organization with too rapid growth. It's about conscious growth. This starts with selecting the right candidate: Is this person a good fit for us? Do they share our values? Are they committed to our vision? And it continues with our time- and resource-intensive onboarding process. New team members gain insights into all areas of the company.
With such a complex product, it's especially important to understand the interrelationships. Interdisciplinary collaboration is also important to us, which we map out through cross-team interfaces. This requires building a strong understanding, and that also requires time and attention.
These challenges also extend into our daily collaboration: We achieve the high degree of adaptability and openness we strive for through our agile working methods. This allows us to quickly and flexibly adapt to changes within the team, but also outside of our Innosabi universe, and to adapt to them as quickly and effectively as possible.
An insight… 
… into the Innosabi universe.
Bootstrapping for a self-directed course
Munich Startup: Speaking of financing: In our last conversation, you were looking for financing. How did that story continue?
Innosabi: After many promising discussions with investors, we initially decided to build our product without external capital and prove product-market fit. This is certainly the more unusual way to develop a technology business model, but it has enabled us to build a thoroughly healthy and stable company.
We're proud of how far we've come with courage and our hands-on mentality. Bootstrapping has enabled us to chart a self-determined course and achieve conscious, organic growth. We now have large clients in our portfolio with good and strong customer relationships, which naturally gives us additional stability. We're also particularly happy and proud to have received EU funding through Horizon 2020, which is giving us additional momentum.
However, this doesn't necessarily mean that this will always be the only path for us. Should we decide, for example, to pursue even stronger growth, the question of financing could become more relevant again.
“Practice what you preach”
Munich Startup: In your opinion, what is the most important thing for sustainable and successful corporate development?
Innosabi: Today, more than ever, it's true that if you want to be successful, you have to be faster than the competition. For accelerated innovation and development processes, connecting all players in an ecosystem is essential. This means incorporating the diverse ideas and skills of your own team as well as collaborating with customers. This ensures customer-focused and in-demand product development. The exchange and collaboration with startups, experts, and suppliers enables us to address current challenges and identify trends early on.
In our case, the guiding principle for sustainable and successful corporate development can be summed up as "practice what you preach": Our software provides the tools to enable every organization to connect across the entire ecosystem. Naturally, we want to implement the same approach at Innosabi. With our "Innosabi beta" platform, for example, we have built our own customer platform that supports close communication with our customers.
Innosabi: Not satisfied with the status quo
Munich Startup: Where do you see yourselves in ten years? Will you have an office in the Argentinian countryside or San Francisco?
Innosabi: There's still a very strong feeling of wanting to achieve so much. The point we're at now is a step on our journey—but it's certainly not the end. We don't want to be satisfied with the status quo yet, and we still have so many ideas. That will be the case in ten years, too.
What defines Innosabi are the people and their passion for what we do. We will continue to use this passion to advance our product in the future. The focus will remain on training our artificial intelligence and linking data through machine learning in such a way that the right decisions can be made quickly based on this data, further accelerating innovation processes.
We're initially open to where we'll do this. We only moved into our new home near Munich's Friedensengel in the middle of last year, and we feel very comfortable there. Of course, there's nothing wrong with working in the Argentinian countryside, San Francisco, or even in completely undiscovered places.
Munich Startup: Thank you for the update!
If you want to read more, where the Munich startup comes from and what the status was in 2016 at our last interview, is happily.
