Sep

Our new name is Braver

[Merk: Denne posten ble publisert i august 2020 på vår forrige nettside]

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It is early August 2020. The world has changed significantly over the past few months. So have we, and we are finally ready to share some exciting news with you!

Niels Bohr once said that “prediction is difficult – especially about the future”. Regardless, plenty of ink has been spilled in attempts to predict what “the new normal” might look like after COVID-19. We, like everybody else, have our hypotheses for what the future may hold, but in such uncertain times we lean towards a Bohrian, humble approach. We don’t know what the future brings, nor does anybody else.

However, we do have strong opinions on what qualities, traits and characteristics we as a society need more of in the times ahead, if we are to thrive and prosper. At the top of that list is characteristic that is not talked about nearly enough: bravery.

Change requires bravery

The world has problems. It has always had problems. Big, small, existential, ecological, ethical, and petty problems.

Yet, over the last few years, many problems seem to have grown and expanded at an alarming rate. The climate crisis is raging like an ever stronger storm all around us, the global mental health crisis is depressing, the world’s biodiversity is on the red list, and the global inequality level has reached a historic high.

If the status quo got us here – is that something we should strive to get back to?

Something must clearly be done differently. But to do something different tomorrow than what we did yesterday, a few foundational pieces must be in place. There must be a desire to change, and there must be an ability to change – but first of all comes bravery.

Bravery to stand up for something you believe in. Bravery to challenge norms and expectations. Bravery to dream of a better world, bravery to believe in one’s own ability to drive change, and bravery to do an honest attempt at shaping the world according to your ideal image of it.

We need brave individuals, organisations and companies to create a future-proof and sustainable society.

Unfortunately, nobody talks about bravery in business.

We intend to change that.

Our new name is Braver

As of today, our company name is Braver.

Not because we see ourselves as fantastically brave, but because we intend to bring bravery into the organisations and teams we get to work with going forwards. Not because we as individuals nor as a company has reached “peak bravery”, but because bravery is a quality we strive to cultivate and develop in ourselves and others for many years to come.

Uromaker (=”Troublemaker” in Norwegian) was a courageous company name. Oppositional in many ways, rebellious one might say, but certainly built on a fundamental desire to do good, to create positive change by questioning and challenging the status quo in different ways.

At this point, Uromaker has done its job as a name for us. It worked well for what we were, but it no longer aligns with what we want to become.

The markets we operate in require different things today than it did six months ago. We don’t need to make more trouble now – we need to be inspired to act, do, shape and create whatever the “new normal” ought to become. As venture capitalist Marc Andreesen says – “it’s time to build”.

Becoming the preferred launch partner for corporate innovation ventures

Braver is our next step along the path we have been on for a few years: innovation and new value creation in untraditional ways.

Our background is in the wonderful world of startups, which is a place of immense bravery. Most startups fail, and the same is true of most corporate innovation projects. Despite that fact, entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs choose to challenge the odds, and dash ahead, full of drive, energy and a dose og naive optimisn in the pursuit of creating something new and valuable.

We have helped several Norwegian corporates with such innovation processes over the last few years. Sparebanken Vest, a forward-leaning bank if Norway every saw one, let us gather and analyse customer insight early in the development of their brand new challenger bank Bulder. Together with the shipping company Grieg Star, we get to develop and launch their innovation branch called Grieg Edge, and with the residential real estate giant BATE, we completed a sprint to bring the idea for Fiksa to market in record time.

In all these examples, our role has been as a launch partner for corporate innovation ventures. We are brought in to lead the process from idea to launch. That’s it. Our methodology plus the client’s deep domain expertise lead to better, faster innovations than either of us could have developed alone. That’s an innovation model we believe in, and a role we want to get ever better at going forwards.