Background

Catharina van Delden is Co-Founder & CEO of innosabi GmbH (www.innosabi.com), a crowdsourcing software company, leveraging the internet community for new product development. Since 2013 she is also member of the Presiding Committee of BITKOM industrial association, representing the ICT industry with a special focus on the startup eco system.

We'll talk with Catharina about ...

- how to kick start a company - how to leverage the internet community for innovation - how to develop a solid software product and - how to successfully grow a company during the first 3 years.

innosabi was founded in December 2010 and is a provider of crowdsourcing, open innovation software and services. It helps companies to open up their innovation processes to external knowledge via the web and thus to reduce the risk of new products. innosabis customers come from various industries, including Continental, dm Drogeriemarkt, Edeka, Ford, Görtz, Haribo, Kärcher, 20th Century Fox, etc.

Furthermore, innosabi operates Germany's largest product development community for the consumer goods industry unserAller. In 2011 it was awarded the IKT-innovativ price by the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs as most innovative ICT Startup in Germany.

Prior to founding innosabi GmbH Catharina worked for OSRAM's marketing department in Germany and India. Catharina is a multiple winner of the INFOCOM Future Leadership Awards on "Innovation in a Downturn" and „Innovation driving Service Excellence" and has published several publications on the topics of open innovation and social media marketing. She is an MBA graduate of Technical University of Munich and UC Berkeley / USA.

We are excited to welcome Catharina on stage to share her entrepreneurial story with us.

About Google #40Forward Initiative

This will be a special event as we are joining Google in their #40Forward initiative featuring successfull female entrepreneurs worldwide. While women are starting companies at 1.5 times the national average in the US, in the startup sphere, women are poorly represented in accelerators, co­working spaces and tech events around the world. In hopes of sparking change, Google for Entrepreneurs launched a challenge to startup and entrepreneur organizations to create new innovative programs to increase the representation and advance women in their local communities. #40Forward is a challenge issued by Google for Entrepreneurs and various startup and entrepreneur organizations worldwide like Startup Grind to create new innovative programs to increase participation of women by 25% in 2014 in their communities. Google is providing funding and program assistance to further the efforts of women entrepreneurs through these programs. Google is excited to announce that 40 organizations took the challenge to rethinking the gender gap. Google for Entrepreneurs is dedicating $1million toward this effort. To learn more about these programs and  partners, checkout the hashtag #40forward or visit google.com/entrepreneurs.