Interviewee: P2, more F not really PM
Role: portfolio-manager
Date: —
Interviewer: —
Interview Summary
Portfolio manager role
We invest in companies with a technology so they can grow and scale. To do that, we scout companies, help them develop their proposition further, and form consortia for technical or business model validation. We also look at which barriers companies run into when they want to grow further — we call those our ecosystem projects. In terms of how we work: we do almost everything ourselves. We signal a problem, set up a program, co-create with companies to understand what they need, secure budget from municipalities, run voucher rounds, build a website, scout companies, help them write applications, set up selection committees with external parties like Medical Delta and TNO — and then we stay involved throughout. We call companies regularly, connect them to the right people, and organize masterclasses when needed. Sometimes we take a different role — we set up a consortium with companies and a university, find a subsidy scheme that fits, and then step out. So it’s roughly half-half. The community manager role is not something we see as ours. But we do sometimes help set one up. we’re also searching for what our role should be as we’ve matured. we try not to become the secretary. It can happen that you suddenly end up always writing the minutes and setting all the agendas, and at some point you have to place that back with the group — they shouldn’t keep leaning on you
Definition of innovation goal of innovation
We’re very good at saying ‘this isn’t working, let’s start something new’ instead of asking how we can improve things together.
Decision making
Decisions are made based on financial and time investment. Up to around €10,000 in hours, the team lead decides. Above that it goes to the head of innovation, and above €50,000 it goes to the MT — though mainly when we’re committing co-financing or a significant flow of money is involved. Substantive decisions are trusted to the colleagues who work directly with the companies, tested with the team lead. I’m team lead for Horticulture and Life Science & Health, and within the sector plans we draw up together every few years, I can largely make those calls myself
Overview of what info
How we make decisions has evolved over the years. In the beginning we just hired people who knew the sector and leaned on their judgment — someone came with a good story and we tried to shoot holes in it. If we couldn’t, we moved forward. Gradually that stopped working, so now we try to be more analytical: how many companies are in this field, where are the problems, how much funding have they raised. But data only tells you so much, so we still substantiate it with interviews and conversations. Ultimately it’s still quite exploratory — we test whether companies actually need what we’re thinking of and whether they’d want to participate, and from that we gauge whether we have enough confidence to move forward.
Monitoring progress
We also work with impact mapping. We reason back from a goal — like accessible care — and ask: if we do these activities, what do we actually influence? Things like TRL increase or investor-readiness. We try to measure that, though we don’t do it for every project because it takes a lot of time and we track it all in Excel ourselves. Every quarter, per sector, we review where each project stands and how much capacity we have. That balance is sometimes tricky — once you’re deep in execution, it’s hard to let go, but if you can’t let go, you can’t pick up new things either.
Sharing learnings knowledge
For information sharing within projects, we mainly use PowerPoints, project plans shared via email, and Teams channels. Teams has made things a bit better — you can invite externals and put everything in one place — but it’s not very transparent either. If I create a channel, my colleague just has to know it exists. Internally, we do try to share lessons learned. We have intervision sessions from time to time, though it’s a bit voluntary — dependent on who likes to bring something in. We used to have a more structured ‘enrichment carousel’ where colleagues would pitch their projects, but it started to feel like defending your project rather than enriching it, so that didn’t stick. Now we look at completed projects in our portfolio and try to feed back what worked and what didn’t. It’s a bit made-do, not super strict.
Communications relations within community
On the health of a partnership, we don’t have formal tools, but we do pick up on it — and precisely because we’re more independent, we can make things discussable. If a university is being too dominant and the companies are just hanging along, we can say: this is skewed, it’s supposed to be give and take. How well we do this does depend on the person though — one colleague is very sensitive to group dynamics, another just looks at whether the project is making technological progress.
Systematizing collaboration replicating structural approach
At a higher level, we manage a project portfolio with four phases: signaling, exploring, accelerating, and then either execution or saying goodbye. In terms of tooling, we’re actually quite limited. A lot of knowledge sits in people’s heads. We have a CRM system, but it doesn’t really work well. We track which companies are linked to which projects, but broader ecosystem mapping is hard. We sometimes commission a sector analysis from an external party, but we don’t have the software or the structural setup to do proper network mapping ourselves. We’re still too much organized as an hours factory — it all sits on skills and relationships, and we miss that broader infrastructure.
Role in the innovation process
we go and figure that out: is it simply a matter of matchmaking, or is there a deeper disconnect? Once there’s a shared language and a clear problem definition, we can usually step out again. That said, it doesn’t always go smoothly. With Robocrops in agri-tech, for example, we’ve been at it for years. The idea was to create an intermediary organization to bridge growers and technology companies. But we haven’t found a model that works well yet — it still costs a lot of time and support from us, and at some point you have to ask yourself: do we give this up, or do we push for another year? What partners generally want from us is project management, communication, visibility — being on stage, access to new customers. And of course funding, but we don’t have project financing ourselves, so that always requires collective effort.
Tooling needs
In terms of tooling, what would really help us is better network mapping and clearer overviews of the ecosystem — which companies are there, how long have they been around, what phase are they in. I often get asked what this region is better at than others, or what the top ten fast growers are, and every time it costs us time to dig that out. We know the sector well by now, but making that visible to others — or to people who are new — is still hard.
Time lost
One thing we haven’t really touched on yet is the time we spend aligning national policy with the region. With something like defense, everyone is suddenly shouting about it nationally, but translating that into something concrete for regional SMEs is incredibly hard. Try getting someone at the Ministry of Defense to actually meet with an small company. So we spend a lot of time helping companies understand what new regulations or priorities actually mean for them in practice — and pushing ministries to not just launch challenges, but also ensure development funding and actual procurement follow.Bridging that national-regional gap takes a lot of capacity, and if we’re too deep in execution projects, we can’t free that up. So it really is one leg in the policy meeting cycle and one leg with the companies, trying to build that bridge — ideally through a concrete project or program.