Driving Corporate Innovation

Alex is currently working as Senior Innovation Consultant and Digital Product Designer. He has strong enthusiasm and experience in building innovative products and services, with a background in UX/UI and Front-End Development. Furthermore, he founded several companies which helps him to bring the startup mindset and tools to corporates, as well as to understand products as a whole.

Anton is Managing Director of Pioneers. A technology enthusiast specializing in helping corporates achieve their innovation goals through working with startups and building new ventures. He has experience organizing and planning hackathons, product design sprints, accelerators, and company building programs.

Barbara focuses strongly on fostering startup thinking in corporations, offering new mindsets and practical implementation methods - of unconventional manner – in order to profit from the digital transformation. She empowers intrapreneurs along their innovation journey from ideation to a first clickdummy, benefiting from her experience in change management & business model innovation projects. By co-founding a food service start-up in the middle of the mexican rainforest she gained a deep understanding of cultural conflicts. Her creative background in high performance dancing and jazz shaped her “out of the box angle” on given challenges.

In the role of an innovation consultant, David supports corporations in various kinds of startup-corporate-collaboration projects and fosters internal innovation activities by conducting an internal innovation programme over the duration of one year. With his strong background in Entrepreneurship and Innovation and his working experience in a venture-backed tech-startup, he currently has a focus on projects in the fields of Industry 4.0, Smart City and Mobility. Furthermore, he is part of a consortium of a cross-border project in the Health sector funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program.

Erik, Innovation Consultant at Pioneers, supports companies in implementing innovation formats and tools in their daily work and in setting up intrapreneurship programs to promote internal innovation development. With his legal background and experience in leading an international organisation, Erik has a strong solution-oriented approach, which he currently applies in projects in the areas of banking & finance and mobility. Erik's drive for innovation has led him to co-organize and lead three highly successful GovTech.Pioneers' editions, which created an extraordinary opportunity for government officials to connect, learn and interact with experts and start-ups. Besides his current projects, Erik is passionate about SportsTech and innovation in sports.

Felix is Director Innovation & Strategy at Pioneers. He has driven digitization in international companies for over 17 years, most of the time as an innovation and startup expert at Axel Springer and PwC. As a passionate networker, he is enthusiastic about building transformational innovations with medium-sized companies and startups. At Pioneers Felix focuses on business growth and market positioning.

Gaurav is Senior Innovation Consultant at Pioneers. He has a breadth of experience having worked for large international organizations as well as founding two startups that tried to solve everyday problems millennials face. His focus now is helping bridge the gap between corporates and startups with innovation formats such as hackathons, acceleration programs and design sprints. Industry focus where he has led multiple projects with industry leaders includes Energy, FinTech, Logistic and InsurTech.

Janos is engagement manager and member of the Pioneers innovation consulting management team. As an all-around innovation project and business development manager, he passionately guides corporate partners in uncovering and defining the right problems to solve, choosing the most effective innovation approach and achieving the defined objectives by empowering intra- and entrepreneurs to be Pioneers.

is an Engagement Manager at Pioneers. Passionate about urban development, the future of public service delivery and digital transformation, he is planning and designing startup-driven innovation, change management and research projects for cities, large OEMs and Public Utility companies.

In his role as Engagement Manager, Michael builds strong connections with corporate clients and further develops the business and digital products of Pioneers. He has a background in Economics and has worked several years in the Berlin and US startup ecosystem in digital technologies such as 3D printing, machine learning or online education. He has built and managed new products and services in growth-stage startups and unicorn companies alike.

Michael is our expert in startup-driven innovation. Having worked in 3 startups prior to Pioneers, he is an expert in startup tools and working styles including customer-centric product development, the lean startup method as well as agile development.Having completed a full-stack software development program, he also provides the necessary tech skills to develop software products from design to production.Michael has completed more than 15 startup focused innovation projects and hence provides extensive knowledge in goal setting and use case definition, scouting & selection of startups as well as PoC and pilot development. With the completion of the Strategy, Innovation & Management Control Master (SIMC) at WU, he has also a strong academic background in innovation topics.

Michaela is an Innovation Consultant at Pioneers passionate about using business to drive innovation as a force for good. Originally from Scotland, and having worked in a startup environment herself, she brings diverse experience in the areas of intrapreneurship, social innovation, startup corporate collaboration, hackathons and innovation workshops. She has implemented these formats across numerous companies with particular focus on FinTech, Energy and Aerospace.

As an Innovation Consultant at Pioneers, Verena jointly develops, implements and improves innovation processes with corporate clients. Being a creative mind with a passion for entrepreneurship and impact innovation, she has experience in setting up innovation labs, facilitating design sprints, on-site as well as virtual, organising rapid prototyping challenges and building bridges between startups and corporates through various formats. Her project work has focused on FinTech, InsurTech and Energy while being enthusiastic about design and sustainability.

Annabelle is exploring the boundaries of IoT and innovation at the NASDAQ-listed retail solution provider ITAB, where she serves as the Vice President R&D. Before her time at ITAB, Annabelle was part of the management team at Pioneers, where she led and developed a team of consultants and conducted various innovation projects for both, SMEs as well as blue chip companies. Besides being experienced in setting up international, multi-corporate accelerator programs from scratch, she has also worked in Venture Capital for a Silicon Valley investor and co-founded a fintech startup and one data ethics think tank in Munich. In her free time, Annabelle loves to pay it forward through mentoring young entrepreneurs and by contributing to the Pioneers Expert Board.

Harald is Manager and team lead at Pioneers and has run more than 30 innovation consulting projects for a variety of clients in different industries across the world. His passion is to work with innovative people on new products and services. He has extensive know-how in the field of intrapreneurship, startup-corporate collaboration and venture building where he delivers significant value to his clients by creating successful outcomes. He joined Pioneers Consulting services in the early days and helped building up the business unit.

Former tech entrepreneur now seasoned venture capitalist, Markus is a partner in Speedinvest’s sector-agnostic seed team. He is passionate about B2B software companies (led Impala, Upvest, Shapr3D) and consumer ventures (led SecondNature, Refurbed) that tackle under-digitised markets. Previously in charge of the fund’s pre-seed activities, he built a transverse portfolio of 40+ companies all across Europe.Earlier in his career, he co-founded an investor-backed logistics tech startup, advised multiple companies on their path to scale and ran his own venture. He has a background in Business Administration and Law.Globetrotter but Austrian at heart, Markus is a very active contributor to the local ecosystem. He lectures at the Vienna Technical University, runs initiatives to increase diversity in business leadership and holds board or advisory roles in several nonprofits and public institutions. In 2018, he was included in Forbes Magazine’s annual 30 under 30 list.

During his studies in Vienna, Bernhard Lehner worked as a journalist for several media, including Die Presse. After founding and successfully establishing his own communication agency, he switched in 2006 as a partner to the first Austrian startup incubator i5invest. Since then he has worked as a co-founder (including 123people, tripwolf, all about apps, Adverity, Agentur Mint and others) and as a business angel (including Runtastic, wikitude, wikifolio and My Esel). Bernhard Lehner has lived with his family near Linz since 2015.

Daniel Horak is co-founder and managing partner of 2013 founded crowdinvesting platform CONDA. Additionally, he is advisory board member of AustrianStartups (since 2014) and Digital Asset Association Austria (since 2018). He gained his first startup experience in 2007 by founding Spoken Language System, a company developing chat bots for customer support and worked for several years as IT- and management consultant.Daniel holds master’s degrees in business informatics as well as in executive management, currently he is engaged as part time lecturer for business planning and early stage financing at various universities and holds workshops and presentations about startups, financing and Blockchain on a regular basis.In 2017 he got awarded by Forbes DACH as 30under30 and has been a part of the Fintech Advisory Board by the Austrian ministry of finance in 2018.Since October 2019 Daniel acts as Chief Sales Officer within the startup300 company group.

Vorstand und Co-Founder startup300 AG. Michael Eisler ist ein Serial Entrepreneur und erfahrener Startup-Founder. Geboren (1980) und aufgewachsen in Linz machte er seine ersten unternehmerischen Schritte bereits während seiner Schulzeit in einer Informatik-HTL. Unmittelbar nach Schulabschluss gründete er die DIG AG, die er bis 2012 auf 35 Mitarbeiter entwickelte und anschließend an die Liechtensteinische Post AG verkaufte. Die Gründung der Wappwolf Inc. führte ihn an die US-Westküste, an der er mehrere Jahre arbeitete und lebte, unter anderem in Los Angeles als General Manager von Talenthouse. Seit 2015 lebt Michael Eisler mit seiner Familie in Linz.