The Authors
Paolo Lombardi, PhD
Paolo Lombardi co-founded two startups of his own before creating the startup accelerator Techpeaks in the Italian Alps, together with an international team including investors (LDV Capital, Earlybird Venture Capital) and research stakeholders (University of Trento, FBK – Bruno Kessler Foundation). The accelerator was the first international and public program of its kind in Europe, and the program’s design was closely inspired by Y Combinator, Start-Up Chile, and Startup Weekend. This experience promoted a steep learning curve, after which Paolo moved laterally to design and manage over two dozen other programs with corporations and public institutions, including projects with the World Bank, the European Commission, and Italy’s main telco operator TIM. Paolo was a Fulbright Fellow at Santa Clara University, California, a visiting researcher at the University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, and holds a double PhD in Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence from the Universities of Pavia, Italy, and Paris Sud, France. He has been a Business Accelerator manager at the European Institute of Technology – EIT Digital, and a Scientific Officer at the European Commission. He is an external lecturer of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Polytechnic University of Milan, Bocconi Business School, and the University of Trento, Italy. Paolo has hands-on coached and supported the business development and fund-raising of hundreds of startups in the incubators, accelerators, and hackathons he has created or directed in digital, robotics, social impact, and creative industries.
Adam Berk
Adam Berk is an out-of-the-box thinker, a lean entrepreneur, lean teacher, and serial entrepreneur who helps large organizations implement innovation at scale. He is one of the lucky ones who has found his one thing—that intersection between what one is good at, what one loves (and can be paid for), and what the world needs. His work in that intersection includes mentoring startups in startup programs like Google’s AI for Social Good Accelerator, the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator, and digitalundivided. He helps grantees and traditional startups with hypothesis testing, customer discovery and design sprints, assumptions mapping and prioritization, strategy, expansion into the US market, adoption of OKRs as they scale, and hiring. He advises the programs themselves, formally or informally, as to their design.
Adam’s journey to this place follows the Startup Program Strategy canvas quite remarkably. After graduating with a degree in Economics from Emory University in 2000, he started in Circle 3—a startup guy. He started neighborrow.com, one of the very first sharing economy companies in the world, with Dave Tomback. Learning many important lessons along the way, the most important of which was to understand deeply “What problem are you solving?” Now in Circle 2, Adam spent time teaching, mentoring, coaching, and empathizing with product teams, embracing a lean startup and design thinkers mentality. This led naturally to Circle 1, the org. Adam broke into corporate innovation consulting when Sonja Kresojevic was putting together a team to work on the Pearson Lean Product Lifecycle. There he took what he knew about lean and agile and gained applicable experience into corporate politics, governance, and how budgets work in the real word. He is dedicated to helping organizations that are raising the standards (both economic and otherwise) for all people around the world.