Joost Fleuren
Program Manager Innovation Lab at the Chamber of Commerce
How do you transform the classic meeting with all its flaws, into a decisive process that makes everyone happy? We ask Joost Fleuren, program manager of the Innovation Lab of the Chamber of Commerce.
The Innovation Lab of the Chamber of Commerce (COC) develops new products and services for the COC that are based on disruptive innovations in areas such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and data science.
Why did COC choose Yabbu?
The COC has traditionally had a strong relationship with its customers. The organization has a strong external orientation. Add to this that we have an open corporate culture. It is a culture where ideas aren’t nipped in the bud as soon as they kick against the status quo or do not immediately fit into our current business model. This means that there is plenty of room in our organization for creativity, inventiveness and out-of-the-box thinking. We have a powerful engine for generating ideas and concepts, but in the end only successful innovations count. You also need structure for that, a need that clearly plays a role in the Innovation Lab.
How did the introduction go?
The Innovation Lab team meets every two weeks. Before we started working with Yabbu, most of the planned meeting time was used to catch up on new ideas and the progress of our projects. As a result, we did not get enough attention to more strategic topics, discussing the coherence in what we do, and making well-considered choices. With the introduction of Yabbu we wanted to create time for this. We clearly set this goal during the introduction, with the emphasis on the benefits for both the participants and the COC as organization. We immediately started using Yabbu in the next meeting. This meeting was prepared in Yabbu and everybody made an account during the meeting and practiced briefly. There was also a short discussion about the “rules of the game” and in fact it was all surprisingly simple from then on. The most important thing was the careful introduction.
What did it deliver?
The Innovation Lab operates in an environment that is changing at lightning speed. We are dealing with continuous change. That makes our work intrinsically complex and that requires a lot of our people. It is all the more important to create structure in our cooperation process. Yabbu offers that structure and ensures that we can handle all kinds of informative and administrative matters in our own time, even before we meet. As a result, we have more time for important topics during the meeting and we are able to get to the essence much faster. It feels good that we, as Innovation Lab, now also meet in an innovative way. It gives our team extra energy.