Since 2000 HYVE successfully applies end2end innovation processes from needs to successfully launched products. We combine design thinking, lean startup, and agile working methods and build prototypes in our own workshop at an early stage. HYVE strongly believes in the power of innovation networks and ecosystems of relevant partners along the entire innovation process. We constantly and actively integrate various users und customers in our innovation projects. HYVE actively nurtures its “Innovators DNA” and pushes ideas successfully to market ready solutions – we practice what we preach.
Sustainable Innovation | Design Thinking | Service Design | Lean Startup | Open Innovation | Intrapreneurship | Agile Development
Innovation philosophies we work with
Sustainable Innovation
We understand innovation as so much more than a new technology, the next product or brand new service. Innovation encompasses culture, production, consumption, ethics and creates new economic, ecological and social values.
Sustainable innovation requires equal consideration of environmental, economic and social criteria. It involves all current and future generations in business decisions. We work with sustainable transformers and sustainability experts to design how companies can implement sustainability in their innovation processes, corporate ethics and individual projects. Find out how we can advance sustainable innovation together!
Design Thinking
Design Thinking is more than just a workshop. For us, Design Thinking is a mindset to work on our projects in a structured way. Our design thinking process consists of 5 phases: understanding the customer, defining the challenge, generating ideas, translating them into first prototypes and testing them with end users. We work with approaches like Lean Prototyping, Design Sprints and use innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence (tawny.ai) to test the prototypes. Design Thinking is about ensuring the desirability, feasibility and profitability of your innovation to reduce your innovation risk.
Service Design
Service design is about designing ecosystems that deliver meaningful experiences to the customers – across physical and digital touchpoints. For us at HYVE, Service design is a mindset and a toolbox:
The mindset helps you to see the big picture – understand the whole experience from your customers’ perspective. With that in mind, you can identify opportunities for your business and get many ideas. Our service design toolbox helps you to actually develop, test, and most importantly deliver human-centric services – that are delightful for your customer, efficient for your organization, and are agile by design – thus ready for changing needs of the future. With service design, you can understand the big picture from your customers’ point of view, identify opportunities for innovation and bring services to market that delight your customers.
Lean Startup & Business Model Prototyping
We are experts in the spin-off and evaluation of innovative-disruptive business ideas.
Using hypothesis-driven data generation, goal-oriented creative techniques, agile iteration & feedback loops as well as our comprehensive innovation network, we minimize risks and pave the way for promising entrepreneurial futures.
We use the Lean Startup approach in our own way of working and help our clients to establish this approach in their processes as well, in order to explore and implement new business ideas as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Open Innovation
The best possible problem solvers are out there somewhere – we know where.
In an immensely accelerated world, you need the right input, at the right time, for long-term competitive action.
In order to sustainably survive in global competition, we enrich your research & development process with the approach of Open Innovation through selected external knowledge. HYVE has the network and access to the appropriate expert communities for your individual challenges, as well as its own crowdsourcing platform with more than 10,000 problem-solvers – the HYVE Crowd. Open Innovation and the secrecy of sensitive data are not a contradiction, but our mission, for over 20 years.
Intrapreneurship
Many long-established corporations are facing similar challenges today: a volatile and dynamic time with drivers such as digitalization, rapidly changing customer requirements, large digital players, nimble startups and the resulting new demands on innovation processes that need to be managed and shaped. HYVE addresses these challenges with specially tailored intrapreneurship programs and coaches companies and employees to leave their slow processes behind and bring new innovations to market as nimbly as startups. These intrapreneurship programs can range from pure methodological support to collaborative work with teams and the development of MVPs.
Agile Development
In general, agile project management/development (e.g. SCRUM) is understood as a cyclical implementation of projects, which is particularly applied in project environments with high complexity, e.g. in software and technology development. Due to this specificity in the project environment, agile development requires above all teams with a marked willingness to adapt to change and a space in which decisions can be made and implemented autonomously by the teams. To work with our clients in an agile way or to set up such processes for them, we use our tools & methods to help address uncertain project environments and to better understand and control complexity. Agile development helps teams to minimize risk and reprioritize tasks to quickly develop a successful product.
Innovation needs collaboration
We provide our customers with access to a unique innovation ecosystem that includes market researchers, designers and strategists, experts, start-ups, universities, AI experts, factory partners and of course our HYVE Crowd of more than 10.000 innovators.
HYVE Crowd
With the HYVE Crowd, we give our clients access to a growing, diverse and creative community of over 8.500 members who provide ideas and solutions for various challenges.
HYVE Startups
Whether VR, artificial intelligence, crowdsourcing or platform solutions, HYVE start-ups are best practice examples and show how new technologies or methods lead to innovative solutions that the market needs and loves. The HYVE Startup Building activities are open to entrepreneurs, corporate venturing initiatives and investors. In order to create a successful incubation environment, we contribute our HYVE ecosystem, expertise in all core innovation disciplines and lean start-up methodology as a guiding principle.
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HYVE Clients
We develop new, ingenious solutions together with clients who are also part of our comprehensive (eco)system. 70% of our clients are DAX companies. Our expertise and our network enable us to optimally support clients from all industries and to help them to implement genuine innovations; from car manufacturers to state governments, from businesses focused on manual work to high-tech companies, from healthcare to construction and start-ups.
Academic Partners
We cooperate closely with leading universities and institutions such as Harvard University, MIT in Boston, University of Innsbruck, RWTH Aachen, University of Innsbruck, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, the Technical University of Munich and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. With more than 350 publications in leading academic and industry journals, we have our finger on the pulse of time and adapt promising scientific approaches to create solutions that fit our clients’ challenges.
AI Partners
HYVE is a founding member of the KI Bundesverband, an association in which more than 160 innovative companies, SMEs, start-ups and experts promote the development and application of technologies based on artificial intelligence. In cooperation with business journals, we do not only shape events on the subject of AI as moderators and participants, but also contribute articles on the topic of AI.
Expert Network
HYVE integrates its extensive network of experts into innovation projects; from lead users to Crowd members, from innovation partners to a stakeholder jury for ideas and concepts. From the expert client to the external expert who is focused on one aspect of the overall project. From the scientist to the end user. From the craftsman to the AI Crack. External expertise provides optimal project support.
HYVE Team
We are all explorers & inventors. Whether we are innovation researchers, service or product designers, UI or UX experts, community managers or consultants. Our multi-disciplinary skills united under one roof lead to high flexibility and tailor-made solutions.
Partner Network
With our partner network, we have expanded our multidisciplinary. For systematic innovation management in companies, we integrate HYPE’s software into customer projects. Capgemini and Porsche Consulting accompany us in international strategy projects. All this is done digitally by in-manas, the assistant for numerous strategy and management tasks.
Qvest Group
Since 2023, HYVE has been part of the Qvest Group. Together, we offer our existing and future customers end-to-end innovation solutions, ranging from strategic alignment and customer-centric product innovation to market launch.
HYVE as part of the Qvest Group
HYVE is part of the Qvest Group, a worldwide leading system architect, ICT integrator, and software product developer. Qvest supports companies globally in successfully managing digital transformation, especially in the innovation-driven media and digital industry. Together with Qvest and HYVE, customers can develop innovative strategies, products, services, and business models even faster and implement them from a single source. All essential prerequisites for success in an increasingly digitized world. Next to the headquarters in Cologne, Qvest Group operstes further locations in Europe, the USA, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Learn more about Qvest
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