OUR STORY
Seed
We see our company as an innovation factory, and a leader in helping other firms to build their own innovation factories. The output we strive for is high quality innovation, predictably and sustainably. The means to generate that are systematic approaches and evidence-based methodologies, just like in a modern factory.
This idea goes back to a time when Eicorn’s Founding Partner Linus Bille envisioned going from serial-entrepreneur to parallel-entrepreneur, and the need to run several startups in parallel required repeatability and a systematic approach to innovation. Armed with this vision, Linus enrolled in the 20-month Executive MBA program at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, in 2014 and established a foundation of knowledge to build an innovation factory.
Linus graduated from SBS with high distinction grades and the Dean’s Commendation “for outstanding contribution to the EMBA class and wider school community”. His exam paper at SBS became the founding business plan for Eicorn. Back in Sweden, Linus teamed up with another serial-entrepreneur, Christian Lauritzen, and Eicorn AB was born in October 2015.
Traction
From the very beginning Eicorn focused on helping large organisations to unlock their innovation potential by replacing dysfunctional principles and processes with high-performing, evidence-based counterparts. Volvo Cars was one of the first larger firms to procure innovation excellence expertise from Eicorn, and the company has remained a client ever since.
The founders decided to finance the company organically and spent the first year growing the business as full-time innovation consultants and researchers. Piece by piece Eicorn’s framework, called Enterprise Ignition, started to form a body of knowledge for rethinking innovation and building an innovation factory.
Eicorn hired its first employee in 2016 and quickly expanded its customer base in the Nordics to include firms like Ramboll, Pagero, HSB, Polestar, RISE, Qamcom, Veidekke and Wellspect/Dentsply to name a few. During spring 2017 we established the value proposition that has become the core expertise fuelling our growth: Building high-performing end-to-end innovation programs for big corporations.
Growth
In 2017 Eicorn started to work with the global engineering consultancy WSP to explore corporate venturing opportunities in the Nordics. This work resulted in the Growspark Venture Collaboration program, a corporate accelerator working with innovative startups that can complement WSP’s own strengths and position.
The Growspark initiative, built with Eicorn’s framework for designing and running corporate innovation programs, rendered a lot of excitement and positive feedback for both WSP and Eicorn. For example, a third-party analyzing Nordic accelerators found that Growspark was a highly regarded corporate accelerator among tech-entrepreneurs in Sweden.
Eicorn grows organically by 150% in 2017 and 125% in 2018.
Maturity
During 2018 Eicorn AB expanded the management team and saw a significant spike in demand for our expertise in building innovation programs. The team decided to focus its efforts even more on building the Enterprise Ignition framework to strengthen the ability to deliver predicable and sustainable innovation programs to our clients.
In early 2019 Eicorn formed a strategic partnership with Qamcom Group and Symbiooz AB. Both companies became owners in Eicorn AB through a share-sale by the founders in an effort to diversify ownership in order to accommodate for an even stronger position for Eicorn going forward. In this deal part of the management in Eicorn AB also became owners in the company, and Christian Lauritzen ended his tenure as chairman and partner to act solely as an external advisor.
Going forward, Eicorn’s position is strong and clear: We have created a formidable platform for helping organisations to build their own innovation factories. We continue to grow across the Nordics and beyond. We continue to pioneer the use of evidence-based management to deliver innovation. And we are a world-class team writing the next chapter in the Eicorn story together!