Go out there and meet the customer!
Topics: startups, lean startup, customer development, startup communities, corporate innovation
Vidar focuses on advising corporates and startups on improving entrepreneurial skills. He’s an certified Lean Launchpad trainer.
Mr. Andersen is a Norwegian entrepreneur and Internet industry veteran with over 18 years of professional experience working exclusively with F500 corporations and GOs, currently living in Cologne, Germany.
His work has been featured & recognized by The New York Times, The BBC, Business Insider, CNN, TechCrunch, Netzwertig, TechHustlers, TechCocktail, DViCE, BasicThinking, MLOVE, ZDF, UP Global, Global Week of Entrepreneurship, C’n’B, The European Pirate Summit, LeWeb Paris, London Web Summit, TechCocktail SxSW, Startup Weekend, Nordic Startup Awards, Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship, StartupBus Europe, Monaco Media Forum, Deusto Business School University of Deusto & more.
He founds tech startups to solve problems, consult F100 enterprises on Corporate Entrepreneurship – Growth & Innovation, lectures on startup entrepreneurship at universities, keynotes entrepreneurial events globally and volunteers for the local Cologne startup ecosystem, organizing various groups and events.
He has lectured and taught at NEXT Cologne, BiTS Iserlohn, University of Cologne, Rheinische University of Applied Science Cologne, Knowmads Business University Amsterdam, Karlshochschule International University, NIT Northern Institute of Technology Management Hamburg, at creative agencies, TEDx and keynoted industry events & more.
In March 2014 he was invited to officially represent the state of NRW and Germany at SxSW in Austin, TX as an ambassador. He is also a GEAP scholarship recipient from the esteemed Deusto Business School in Bilbao, Spain and a winner of the Nordic Startup Awards 2012.
In 2013 he was named one of the top 5 must-know people in Germany by a leading technology publication and he was invited to Stanford to receive the Lean Launchpad Instructor certification by Steve Blank and to speak about the Cologne startup community to 100 international professors in entrepreneurship education. Today he teaches the experiential LLP entrepreneurship curriculum from Stanford and Berkeley to our European universities.
On arriving in Cologne, Germany in 2005, he headed the lead digital media agency to T-Mobile International / Deutsche Telekom for almost five years and was also responsible for the launch DMEXCO. For over nine years prior, he had worked with enterprises and GOs – the larges oil companies, publishers, energy providers and government – in Norway to solve their problems with software, creating many Internet industry-firsts.
In 2001 Mr. Andersen also co-founded the popular open source enterprise content management system Plone together with Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi. Users include NASA JPL, The CIA, The FBI, Lufthansa, eBay, Deutsche Telekom, The Government of Brazil, College University London, Yale University, Oxfam and many more.
In 1997, he founded his first company, blacktar.com, to help corporations solve problems with web technology.