At the end of every Innovation Journey, EIT InnoEnergy students are supposed to do a 3-minute presentation to explain our solutions in a competitive way. . First pitches we have done were great! You can see that everyone put a lot of effort and passion into their pitch. However, they were still a bit raw as most of us read out our slides. I mean, I loved the presntations and the innovative solutions but felt there was something still missing. It is true what they say ‘practice makes perfect’ and as we went into our pitches again more recently, the outcome was much better!

This time, we introduced a story and the teams got creative to deliver the message. One of the groups even photoshopped their pictures in their slides and created characters that fitted their narrative. This grasped my attention immediately! This team thought about their target audience (us), the fact that due to many online activities they need to stand out and grasp our attention. Not surprisingly, this group won the best presentation prize.

It is not natural that introducing a storyline instead of solely delivering messages from slides can have such a good result! People enjoy stories and it is actually easier for people to process and remember the information. This is the true  power of storytelling! So why don’t we use this approach when presenting our business ideas more often? Stories are clear and appealing. They bring your ideas to life and the  listener can actually picture your solution as well as feel your passion and drive for it. Empathy from investors is key! This goes way beyond engineering and business skills, deep into human psychology. Making people  emotionally invested by telling a story makes your solution more real to them as well as engages them with your product.

But how to tell a good story? First we need to create a character. In one of our courses, Transdisciplinary Approaches for System Innovations, MSc Energy for Smart Cities students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology received a lecture from Per Grankvist. Per is a well-known Swedish journalist and writer who taught us some tricks to create a good story. Duirng his lecture, he told us to take a closer look at protagonists in  some of the famous movies and novels. If you are always rooting for the protagonist, why would an invester not root for your business idea? As a general idea, your story (pitch) could go like this: ‘someone is struggling and when things could not get any worse,  a hero (or your product 😉) shows up to save the day. Happy ending, the end’.

We learnt many ways to improve our stories and I am practicing them every day now. Just by having an innovative solution, there is no guarantee that you will succeed in the market. Your product also has to be commercially attractive. This is exactly where Innovation Journey skills such as preparing a perfect investor pitch come in to compliment my technical skills!

I love this new tool to deliver our pitches! And I am really enjoying the curriculum for EIT InnoEnergy students. Technologies are developed to serve the public. The Innovation and Entrepreneurship Journey helps us promote our products as well as guides us to think of people’s need and demands when designing them. So, if you are wondering why you should study innovation and entrepreneurship, don’t worry! Everything you will learn  will be 100% useful.

by Yanshu Wei, Master’s in Energy for Smart Cities

Are you ready to start Master’s in Energy for Smart Cities this intake? We invite you to join our current student and graduate who will share with you firsthand everything you might want to know about starting the programme!

InnoTalks Ask our students and graduates: Master’s in Energy for Smart Cities
Date: 27 May
Time: 15.00 CET 
Sign up