39 degrees in Heidelberg. The suit held up anyway. The evening was worth it.
In part one we wrote about why we became TOP 100 Innovators 2026. Now we were there for the celebration.
Christian Wulff, mentor of the competition and former Federal President of Germany, was there. For us, it was the first time at a TOP 100 award ceremony.
What surprised us that evening wasn't the award itself. It was the room. Around 500 companies, as diverse as the German Mittelstand gets. Bakeries. Energy providers. Digital insurers. Climate tech firms. Machine builders. All carrying the same seal, all with completely different stories behind it.
And yet: the same questions everywhere. How do you change things without breaking them? How do you keep the business running while thinking ahead? How do you build something that still holds tomorrow?
Questions we work with every day. It felt strangely familiar.
The Vienna University of Economics and Business evaluated us across more than 100 criteria. Overall rating: A+, against a TOP 100 average of A. What matters more to us than the overall result: in the categories Innovative Processes & Organisation and Outward Orientation / Open Innovation, we rank in the top 10 across all participants.
In practice, that looks like this: with one of our lottery partners, we maintain a shared knowledge base, accessible not just to us but to the client as well, covering market data, technical solutions and research findings. Not an internal wiki. A shared space. With Emilia, our digital legal protection insurance in Switzerland, we're not just a service provider but a co-investor, compensated in equity rather than just billing hours. When an idea comes up internally, it takes us an average of two days to decide whether to pursue it.
None of that is spectacular. But it's the difference between innovation as a claim and innovation as daily practice. The quote that stayed with us from that evening didn't come from us. It describes the TOP 100 winners as a whole:
Companies that build a culture where change is understood not as a threat, but as the normal state of things.
That's about right.
What evenings like this give you, you usually only notice afterwards. Good conversations with people you wouldn't otherwise meet. Questions that stay with you for a while. And the reminder that you're not alone in what drives you.
On to what comes next.
