Jean-Luc Winkler

📣 [ʒɑ̃.lyk] 🚀 Corporate innovation facilitator. Start-up advisor on digital business models and holistic investor negotiations. Intrapreneurship lecturer. 🔋 Batteries included! 🙋‍♂️Get in touch:

Let's co-innovate!

Start-Up Mentoring

Start-Up Mentoring

Advising start-up founders and their teams: business model, investor negotiations, collaborations.

Get your headstart!

I advise start-up founders and their managing team as an independent advisor and as a mentor in various acceleration programs.

Fields of expertise:

  • Value Proposition: Which challenges are you solving that someone else is willing to sacrifice (e.g. to pay) for?
  • Business Model: Which vehicles do you utilize to earn money - today, tomorrow and in X months from now?
  • Competitive Advantage: What is your unfair advantage, that is valuable, rare, and costly to imitate by existing and potential competitors which you are also the best team to exploit?
  • Collaborations: You can’t do everything on your own along your value chain! Who are you partnering with and how do all sides benefit from this partnership?
  • Investor Negotiations: Ready to go fundraising? Investments are a lot more than just the exchange of money for shares/equity. Compile your pitch deck, data room documents, and especially an individualized ask/offering for the investor incl. possible valuable side agreements.

On a limited base, I temporarily join promising start-up teams as interim CTO to align the digital/tech strategy to the overall goals and bring your digital product idea from zero to proof of concept or even MVP.

Start-ups with first traction benefit from my advisory and network as a mid to long-term advisory board member (usually compensated with shares/ESOPS).


Corporate Innovation

I help corporates and SMEs de-risking their innovation activities. Benefit from my knowledge of building a corporate company builder from scratch, scaling it, and successfully launching and staffing spin-offs. As Head of innovation & strategy of an industry-agnostic innovation hub, I have helped companies of various sizes and stages plan and execute their corporate innovation activities.

Fields of expertise:

  • evaluating the suitability of different corporate innovation methods like venture clienting, corporate company building, CVC, or intrapreneurship programs.
  • structuring, planning, and launching the most suitable (mix of) corporate innovation method.
  • staffing the needed team to execute the corporate innovation activities and temporarily taking over interim management roles.
  • preparing and leading investment and cooperation negotiations with startups and partners.

Corporate Innovation

Building corporate innovation units, processes and intrapreneurship programs to accelerate and de-risk innovation activities.

Insights


Find out more about my previous and current projects:

Current Projects


This is a selection of projects I am currently working on. Test the beta versions or sign up for the latest infos:


"Intrapreneur.Tools"
The most comprehensive collection  of kick-starting tools, creative methods, and valuable ressources for innovative entrepreneurs.
🇬🇧🇺🇸

💡

Trying to innovate from within your corporate environment? Searching for Methods to find, evaluate and sharpen your ideas? Need no-code software to build your idea within a fraction of a time?

Start innovating as an Intrapreneur!

"Innovators.Hamburg"
Hamburg offers a variety of innovation units, co-working spaces, labs and hubs across all suburbs. Get to know the innovation eco-system and start connecting!
🇬🇧🇺🇸

📍

Browse through a map of all innovating units in Hamburg or explore them by categories such as Hubs, Labs, Accelerators, VCs, Universities, Corporate Innovation Units or by tags for events or networking oportunities.

Browse Innovation Units!

"adaptive ambiance"
The worlds first truely adaptive ambiant sound player that adapts to your environment!
🇬🇧🇺🇸

🍃

Do you like to listen to ambiant sounds but feel distracted by a sound mix that does not match the current environmental conditions?

Sign up for the private beta!

"TimeIs.Ltd"

[early access!]

Time is limited so make the most out of it: Define your personal goals, learn from my success-proven productivity methods, and build your own habit stack. Where to start? Sign up and find out!
🇬🇧🇺🇸

Working on a side project but lacking the time to finish it? Set yourself goals, find blank spots in your daily schedule and add them to your personal habit stack to become ultimately productive.

Sign up for launch updates!

Shipped!


Whenever I develop a tool or piece of software, I try to make it usable and available for the largest audience possible. These are the projects I have recently built and shipped to the community:


"valuetainment.tk"
customized TikTok Sounds for valueable content creators
🇬🇧🇺🇸

🤳

Want to upload 60 sec infotainment content to TikTok but lacking the right sound?

Add this intro sounds to your videos to catch attention and minimize distraction.

Add intro sounds to your videos!

"1min Konzentrationspause"
Amazon Alexa Voice Skill
for regaining concentration
🇩🇪

In a fraction of a second you can lose your focus.

Gaining it back should not take more than 1 minute!

activate on your Alexa device

"Beginning Player Selector"
Amazon Alexa Voice Skill
for varied player selection
🇬🇧🇺🇸

♟️

Having trouble selecting a player to begin a (board-) game?

Let this skill help you with that tough decision!

activate on your Alexa device

"Carcassonne Utilities"
Digital Board Game Companion
for Carcassonne geeks
🇩🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸

🗺️

Want to choose the perfect combination of Carcassonne Board Game Expansions?

Use (and feel free to contribute to) this utility website completely hosted on GitHub.

Check out on GitHub Pages

"SewingMachineEmoji.com"

[proposal submitted!]

The emoji palette is missing an essential emoji for effective and concise communication: the sewing machine. We are working on changing this!
🇬🇧🇺🇸

🧵

In co-creation with my wife and a good and talented designer friend, we created a proposal for the Unicoode Consortium Emoji proposal in 2021. If everything works out as planned, the sewing machine emoji will be added to vers. 15 in 2022.

Check out the current status!

"RescueTime bitbar"
Display your RescueTime Productivity Score in your Mac Toolbar
🇬🇧🇺🇸

📈

Want to beat your personal productivity score? Track your productivity using RescueTime and display your score in your Mac's toolbar as a motivator to stay focussed.

Beat your productivity score!

My daily habbit stack.

Boosting productivity day by day. Developing both functional and highly effective habbit stacks. This is my routine:

05:00am setting the attitude

  • Every weekday starts with the same reproducible hyper intentional morning routine: alarm clock - no snoozing. Brushing teeth and taking a shower mixing hot and cold water [it feels like hitting the fast forward button on your life, try it if you haven't. I guarantee, you will not be disappointed!] accompanied by various smart bulbs all over my house mimicking a colorful sunrise to get energized for the day.
  • Slipping on a pair of jeans and one of the five shirts that I iron each weekend to minimize the time thinking about what to wear. By that time I have not yet checked any messages or news to be able to come up with unbiased thoughts.

06:15am priming the day

  • Preparing breakfast, having my first espresso dopio from a decent portafilter machine, listening to my personal news selection on a smart speaker. Using a custom skill, you can easily add information to your Alexa morning briefing like a countdown for a deadline of a personal project, advanced weather and public transport information, etc.
  • Checking messages, skimming through some news to find out what has happened while I was sleeping. I am wearing my Pegasi Smart light therapy glasses 2 which improve my sleep and boost my energy level in the midmorning by emitting pecific wavelenght of green light to reduce the melatonin concentration.

07:00am getting a headstart

  • Leaving the house, commuting to work.  When I tell someone that I commute an hour each morning, people tend to react compassionately. But from my perspective, the following hour represents a fix slot in my habbit stack since I am facing 1h of productive time. See what I did there? Rather than seeing the negative aspects of my daily commute, I focus on the positive advantages it entails. I used to have a 20 minute walk to work. Listening to my favourite set of podcasts and ebooks from audible. However, now I am able to turn this - how I call it - "consume time" into "productive time". "Wasting" the time of your daily commute might feel like only a short proportion of your daily wake time but if  you consider the cumulative time spent being unproductive over years you would make a painful mistake losing weeks of possible productive time.
  • My commute is usually the moment where I devote myself to personal projects, mostly tech related: SSHing into my DigitalOcean Server to write some lines of code or fixing a bug, plotting down ideas in OneNote.
  • More than 96% of the time [Yes, I really tracked this over more than a hundred commutes] I can rely on a free seat in both the bus and the train leaving me with a 30min backup plan per week where I will have to prepare something I can do on my phone instead of my laptop (e.g. this schedule was written on my phone using my favourite most versatile note taking app OneNote).

08:15am it's like creativity and efficiency had a baby

  • Arriving at work. Getting my workplace prepared with a cup of tea and a bottle of water and hook my Raspberry Pi productivity dashboard to its power source.
  • The first program I open up in my laptop is Trello, where I arrange today's tasks in my Planyway calenders view, filling the blank spots between calls and meetings. Excessively using the Pomodoro technique for more than a decade now forced me to drill down each card on the list to exceed no more than a 25min slot.

12:00am ever reconsidered your lunch habbits?

  • Meal prep it is! Eating my salad or heating up a bowl of veggie-soup takes no more than 15-20 minutes.ore is less: I avoid drowning myself in a lunch coma by shunning high carb meals and too large portions. Obviously using the lunch break to catch up with aquantainces is a common practice, however going out for lunch will set me back at least one Pomodoro slot. In addition: my mouth is not made for multitasking - eating and communicating at the same time.
  • After Lunch I am wearing my Barner glasses, another kickstarter campaign I backed ,which in turn block the blue light from my trippe monitor setupg computer screens reducing the risk of computer vision syndrome.

05:00pm reached your goal for the day?

  • Finishing my last tasks and reflect back on the day: Have the important tasks been finished? Which tasks should be added to the "to-do column" for the following workday?
  • Cleaning up my desk ensures that I will return to a tidy workspace the next day thus I can directly start focussing on my main tasks without any legacy mess from the previous day.
  • Heading back home, two consecutive Pomodoro timer slots lay ahead of me during my bus and train ride.
  • The best time to read a book or listen to an ebook or consume an in-depth long online article that I have bookmarked to read in the train. I set myself a weekly goal in what to read during my commute. Want to speed up your reading? Technology-wise take the shortcut and try Spritz or spend practise time with Breakthrough Rapid Reading.
  • Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today!

06:30pm spending time with your loved ones

  • Arriving home, acclaimed by the bright smiles of my daughter and wife, the afternoon tees off with relaxed personal time. Nothing to keep track of, no schedules.
  • I adapted the idea of different roles everyone fills. Being a father and a husband comes with liabilities and pleasures I am happy to latch onto. Hence this slot is filled with dinner, playing games (utilizing my truly random "Beginning Player Selector"-Alexa Skill that I developed a couple of years ago) and maintaining the household.
  • However, being private time does not necessarily mean this slot is lacking productivity! Most of my household is automated: Vacuum cleaner robots are running autonomously on each floor, the mood of the lighting and the shades adapt to various environmental factors and the whole garden (lawn, beds and even my flower pots are getting watered based on weather conditions and forecasts).

08:00pm keep pushing!

  • Leveraging the benefits of a desk and fast WiFi you will most likely find my either writing some lines of code (so I basically work after work) or define a couple of new rules within my house automation systems.
  • You might have guessed it: In order to get my focus on the task at hand, J have created a "1-minute break"-Alexa Skill that helps you clearing your mind and get back on track in just 60 seconds. Since this timeslot is oftentimes occupied by other personal obligations, it is rarely taken advatage of. In that case I try to at least synchronize the new features or copy I have written to my servers. Uploading software to production in the train is not the best idea. This is why I write my code offline in a test environment and ship it, when I get back home or arrive at the office.

09:00pm recharge!

  • Time to prepare for bedtime. One spot in my bedtime habbit stack is reserved for my monthly challenges related to health and/or education. Testing a meditation app, doing a proper stretching workout or learning a new skill chunk by chunk that only requires a maximum of 10min - a portion of time everyone is able to add to the habbit stack. Remember: Be brave enough to suck at something new.

Time to by the end of this day.

Work in progress...

"Better done, than then perfect!" - Jean-Luc Winkler

I am constantly working on some new tools, content and offerings:

Coding some small projects utilizing AI
work in progress...
Producing a corporate innovation masterclass
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
new articles on inrapreneurship best practices
in the making - stay tuned

In the meanwhile