Turning Dreams into Reality at grow platform, Home of Bosch Intrapreneurs

grow platform is a fully owned subsidiary of the Bosch Group with eight locations worldwide, covering all international key markets. As the Bosch Incubator, it finances and scales business model innovations, originating from internal divisions and Bosch entities. By doing so, grow platform is contributing to the strong development and future of Bosch. A future in which Bosch products inspire people, improve their quality of life, and help conserve natural resources.

To meet this goal, the platform offers a global Home for Bosch Intrapreneurs: A space where ambitious associates evolve, receive seamless access to resources, apply scientific innovation and product development methods, and transform new breakthrough scalable business model innovations into reality.

In a global market characterized by constant change, our Innovation Hubs network relies on the strategy of agile work. grow platform aims to empower and develop our employees to become ambitious founders and entrepreneurs, like Robert Bosch once used to be. Adopting the Bosch Innovation Framework (BIF), a method based on the lean start-up approach, we iteratively explore new businesses measured in eight defined maturity levels. Such methodology empowers intrapreneurs on how to manage startups and grow a business at maximum pace – a principled approach to new product development.

To drive strategical innovation, Bosch has been developing a framework to align and commit to specified work packages ensuring a user-centered, effective, and staged process to identify, develop, and scale life-improving products and services, invented for life.

In the early phase, strategic search fields, user needs, and business model ideas are being identified, researched, and validated. grow platform is aiming to close the gap between early adopters and the mass market as it is the driver for incubation of validated and scalable business models. Hence, theoretical potential is turned into reality and the way for long-term value, profitable businesses, and success is being paved. We specifically focus on allocating and funding internal innovation projects and business cases, originating in our business divisions, entities, or Bosch internal innovation programs. Once grow platform managed to incubate and scale a new innovation, we aim to implement it in existing or new business areas at Bosch.

Such methodology enables our portfolio teams to adapt to new challenges even quicker and more flexibly, and to turn their business innovations into reality. Applying the agile work strategy to international collaborations creates the ideal conditions for innovative products and satisfied customers – and is a further visionary step towards making grow platform a global key player to drive disruptive business innovations for Bosch.

A successful example is the official spin-off of “AquaEasy, A Bosch Company” with Singapore EDB and grow platform ASEAN.

AquaEasy, A Bosch Company, an AgriTech start-up incubated at grow platform ASEAN, aims to increase shrimp productivity and profitability for farmers with its AI platform. Currently running its Series-A funding round, the startup has made tremendous growth with its global expansion to Indonesia and Vietnam, as well as a strategic partnership with big players like eFishery, VietUc, and Qian Hu.

grow platform encourages entrepreneurship by providing the freedom to fail, access to financing and corporate resources, as well as flexibility to break through the clutter. Through the intrapreneurship journey, founders are also able to hone their leadership skills, which is crucial when building a team, executing, and pitching potential business model innovations.