First day for aspiring entrepreneurs with the Bonnier Accelerator program.
Today marks the start of Bonnier Accelerator, the new program that will give five aspiring entrepreneurs a chance to turn their ideas into a business with help from Bonnier. The five chosen to take part – Jonas Forsslund, Heidi Harman, Maria Elgaard, Fredrik Hjorth and Adrian Swartz – will spend three months developing their ideas further with help from Bonnier.
“The program we’ve developed for them is completely tailored to match the challenge of finding the business opportunities in their ideas during the three months we have,” says Jenny Collén Gustafsson, consultant and start-up expert who has worked as strategic manager for Iqube and developed models and methodology for Tillväxtverket, the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, among other things. “The program is pragmatic, which means we won’t be going over a lot of theory but focus on action. We’ll be combining modern business development tools with tools for personal development so that the entrepreneurs and their ideas and companies can grow in parallel, so we can show concrete, long-term progress much more quickly.”
Collén Gustafsson helped to create the program together with Bonnier AB and Elisabeth Palombo, director of talent management for the company. “We chose to work with Jenny because of her long experience working with startups,” says Palombo. “She knows what challenges they face and what tools are needed. My role in the program is, beside my own experience with business development ant leadership, to help them navigate Bonnier’s decentralized world and understand our culture better.”
Along with action-focused workshops and hands-on individual work, Bonnier Accelerator will provide the five with mentors appropriate to their needs to give advice and serve as a sounding board, plus lots of networking opportunities at events such as the Bonnier Digital Forums and Bonnier’s annual inspiration summit GRID. During the three months, the entrepreneurs will be physically sitting at Bonnier Growth Media. At the end of the program, they will present fully developed business plans to an expert panel who will decide whether to take the next step to continue and turn the plan into reality.
“The program will help make sure they don’t end up making mistakes that others have made before them,” says Collén Gustafsson. “The most difficult thing when it comes to creating a company is not knowing what to focus on when everything seems important. But everything isn’t equally crucial all the time, and we’ll help the participants see their entrepreneurialism more objectively. Entrepreneurs tend to focus on what they think is most fun or simplest, but with us they’ll have to take care of even the parts they don’t think of as fun.”
And what’s the biggest challenge for the entrepreneurs?
“Prioritizing and focusing on the right thing,” Collén Gustafsson says. “It’s not unusual that an incredible amount of time has been spent in developing a product and when it’s ready, there aren’t any customers for it. The challenge is developing a company or idea in a way that includes potential customers in the process so that they’re already sold on the product before it’s even done.”