10 intra/entrepreneur lessons I learned the hard way

Over thirty years ago, I started my first company. Since then, I’ve started more companies, acted as an angel investor in more than ten ventures and as a board member or advisor in several others, and interacted with numerous founders and entrepreneurs. In addition, I’ve collaborated with intrapreneurs inside large organizations trying to get innovations … Read more

Outdated belief #9: We can’t do DevOps because we need safety certification

Embedded systems, by their definition, contain mechanical and electronic components and, through that, interact with the real world. Many of these systems may cause harm to humans if they act in erroneous ways. This is, of course, the case for aeronautical and automotive applications as well as for medical equipment. But also most systems that … Read more

Outdated belief #8: A/B testing is only for online systems

In the online world of software as a service (SaaS), A/B testing in some form is used continuously for virtually any type of development. For an A/B test, two alternative realizations of a feature or some functionality are developed and presented to a test group (alternative B) and a control group (alternative A). Some outcome … Read more

Outdated belief #6: The data is owned by the customer and we can’t monetize it

Digitalization is concerned with the three key enabling digital technologies software, data and artificial intelligence. These build on each other as it typically is software that generates the data from systems in the field and it’s this data (preferably labeled) that forms the basis for machine learning and deep learning. The software-intensive systems industry, as … Read more

Outdated belief #5: Bill of materials trumps everything

A long time ago, I had a discussion with a software architect working for a consumer electronics company. We talked about development efficiency and he explained to me the economics of high-volume manufacturing. When you manufacture a million televisions and you can squeeze one euro out of the bill-of-materials cost, you’ve made the company a … Read more