About Vidar Andersen
Vidar Andersen is a Norwegian serial innovation venture entrepreneur, investor, educator and advisor to F100 corporations on innovation based in Cologne, Germany. He’s been an invited speaker at Stanford, Cambridge, SxSW, Web Summit and LeWeb. In 2015, he was recognised by Wirtschafts Woche as one of the most important people in the German startup scene and was invited as a keynote speaker at the London Intrapreneurship Conference on the topic of data-driven innovation and innovation metrics (KPIs).
Vidar founded his first company in 1997 to help large corporations and GOs outsource innovation and solve problems with software. In 2001 he co-founded the content management system “Plone”, used by NASA, Yale, the CIA, the FBI, Lufthansa, Deutsche Telekom and many more. In 2011 he founded “Gauss – The People Magnet”, the very first social local mobile (SoLoMo) discovery app. In 2012 he was awarded a GEAP scholarship by Deusto University in Bilbao, Spain for his entrepreneurial merits.
In 2013 he was invited to Stanford to be trained and certified by Steve Blank as a certified Lean Launchpad Educator because of his community efforts, enabling him to teach the premium experiential entrepreneurship curriculum from Stanford and Berkeley at our top European universities.
In 2013 he founded +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES (plusandersen.com) to help the large corporations that kept requesting his expertise to achieve continuous innovation and growth as a process, from the bottom up and from the inside out, through science and entrepreneurship.
His work has been featured and recognised by The New York Times, Business Insider, CNN, BBC, TechCrunch, Forbes, TechCocktail, Die Welt, DViCE, ZDF, WDR, DRadio Wissen, WiWo, LinkedIn SlideShare, The Pirate Summit, Le Web, London Web Summit, Dublin Web Summit, TechCocktail Austin, South By Southwest (SxSW), Up Global, the state of NRW and more.
So far he has taught innovation venture entrepreneurship and innovation management at BiTS Iserlohn, Univeristy of Cologne, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), University of Applied Science Cologne, Qazvin Islamic Azad University Iran (QIAU), Knowmads Business University Amsterdam, Karlshochschule International University Karlsruhe, Northern Institute of Technology (NIT) Hamburg, The University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW).
Customers of Andersen include The Royal Norwegian Government, T-Mobile International, Deutsche Telekom, Statoil, Shell, Esso, Exxon, BARCO, AXA, Vebego, Yello and more.
After 10 years solving problems with software, innovating for F500 corporations, GOs and NGOs in Norway, he served as Head of Digital at the lead agency for digital media to T-Mobile International near Cologne from 2005 until his entrepreneurial spirit won, and he quit in 2010 to create his own companies again. He hasn’t looked back since.
