The Month in Review — June 2026

A very busy first half of the year is coming to an end, and a well-deserved break awaits

The heat is on. Summer is here, and it’s time to wrap up on an eventful first half of 2026 and take some well-deserved (at least I think it is) time off to enjoy a nice summer vacation with my family.

But I won’t leave before I have reviewed June, as I experienced it through my work at DTU Skylab.

June was a good and intense month.

From a startup perspective the highlight was witnessing one of my teams, I have spent quite a lot of time and effort supporting, incorporating after a long run in. I was present when the four founders of TOTTI Labs signed the official papers and invited for a celebratory toast.

As mentioned I have been heavily involved in supporting this case over the last couple of years. Their product is a potential game changer for PTSD-victims and other people struggling with anxiety, panic attacks etc, and with my background in MedTech it was immediately clear to me, why this particular team simply had to make it to market with their technology, so future users and customers could benefit from their technology.

I have helped the TOTTI team with support on their business case, utilized my personal network to connect them to their first potential major customer and even helped recruit their commercial co-founder in the parking lot at DTU. So seeing them finally putting pen to paper and make the leap into incorporation was just a huge milestone, I needed to see myself. Huge congratulations to everybody involved.

TOTTI Labs brings the total tally of new research-based startups and spinouts from ‘my’ departments to 3 for this year. Not a bad tally for the first six months and a show of strenght by both DTU and the amazing people taking the big step out into full-on entrepreneurship.

Back at campus, several of my other teams are also moving nicely forward. Graduating from lab to market is a complicated and time consuming process, and the pace depends very much on what you’re working on, the maturity of the technology and the barriers to future market entry. And of course it is an immense transition journey for the founders themselves.

Some of the teams making really focused strides forward are the two teams I have in our new ‘Pre-Scaleup Track’ program at DTU Skylab. It is a program for those who received a major softfunding grant from DTU or the Innovation Fund Denmark, and it is designed to hopefully help propel them forward on the commercial journey.

It’s a great joy to be working with the teams. Going into the program we have set expectations of how we want to work together in the program, and what the teams would ultimately love to get out of it, and I am so grateful that both teams have decided to lean forward on really making an effort to build their future commercial cases.

We have some really good, focused sessions with clear outcomes as to homework for the teams and agreements on what to look at next, and it is just a joy to be a small but very active part of. While the teams of course make all the decisions and are expected to also do the work, it is an opportunity for me to bring a lot of my 25 years of experience in helping great people build businesses and teams to bear, and I really cherish it.

Another big thing, I cherish is the work, we’re doing on the Project Team Model with Sara and Carina. The feeling of momentum, since Sara joined us in the beginning of May is real and absolutely mindblowing.

In June we got to pilot the first intervention of the project, a brand new workshop on Founder Motivation for use in the first stage of the Skylab startup program, which Sara developed and facilitated.

It went really well. Almost too well. There was a lot of really good content and room for reflection, and I think it is probably one of the most demanding workshops, we have ever done in Skylab to the extend where we ask participants to put themselves fully on the line, reflect and share with the others.

As one of the participants, who also attended several other modules of the program reflected: “That one was really intense!”

The one thing we need to work a bit more on is the amount of content in the workshop and maybe reduce it a bit, and then a stronger storyline and perspective to real life examples on the startup journey as such. So we will be digging into that, and it is more in the nitty-gritty fineprint than anything else. But with a NPS of 85 from the participating teams, I think we’re off to a really, really strong start.

What really gives me the goosebumbs in this project is the feeling that we’re developing something that is both new, fresh at DTU and just has so much potential to help galvanize teams and how they work and succeed together. It is genuinely a feeling of breaking new ground, and I love it!

All in all projects related to teams and team development are a big part of what I am spending my time on these days. And I would not have it any other way. I am of the firm conviction that in the end everything comes down to people. Success, failure and everything in between; it is all about people.

One of the other projects, I spend some time on regarding teams, is a new project, where we are looking at how we can better track our teams progress and help them stay focused on the core tasks of the journey.

It is a project that very much speaks to the old business manager in me, and I strongly believe that having an overview of where you are, what’s needed to get to the next level and some clear actions defined to help you get there, will always be a big help to any team.

First of all it helps ensure focus, but it also instills confidence in being able to solve the tasks one by one and the security of knowing that as long as I stick to this, I am still on track with the overall plan.

We’re basing a lot of this work on the KTH Innovation Readiness framework as an engine underneath it all. For that reason I was also super excited to be able to join the annual KTH Innovation Readiness Summit at KTH in Stockholm in June. It was a first for me, and it was super cool to meet almost 60 other innovation professionals from 22 different countries to spar and discuss about the framework and especially how it is being used.

Aside from meeting some really interesting and cool people (two of which, Donnie and Daniel from KTH Innovation are in the picture above), I travelled home with a ton of notes and ideas for our future work, which I will be sharing with my colleagues at DTU Skylab and try to deploy the best of after summer.

The last project, I want to touch on in this longish update is also related to teams.

We have started looking at how to help teams form a strong basis for collaboration early on with a clear understanding of who does what, who contributes what and how to conduct themselves with each other on the startup journey.

Startups is inherently a messy business, and sometimes you can be led astray, if you’re not careful. Worst case someone ends up being hurt by the process, and that is never the objective for anyone. Having a good process and some clear guidelines to facilitate the work will be a strong help, we believe, and I am super happy to be involved in the drafting of what I hope will one day end up becoming the way we do this at DTU.

Other projects

With all of the above being said it goes without saying that I haven’t had a lot of time for other projects during June.

Having said that I am always scouting for opportunities to help a bit more than usual. In my role I have the perfect vantage point for being among the first to see all the cool new stuff coming out, and I do have a couple of projects in my portfolio which I am keeping a bit more close tabs on. In one of them, we have even had a casual initial dialogue, but nothing has come from it, and maybe it never will. But it is nevertheless super exciting.

…This and that

On the personal front, I am gearing up for vacation. I have to be honest and admit that there have been times over the past few months, where I have felt a bit overworked and chasing my tail, so it will be good to get a 3 week break and hopefully get the opportunity to relax and recharge the batteries a bit.

We will be going to Bornholm for a week this year, and other than that we will just do small one day excursions around the Greater Copenhagen area. The girls are getting older, and they are starting to have a life of their own, so eventhough we have 3 full weeks of vacation, we will actually only be together all of us for a bit more than half of that. A new reality is setting in.

I hope to find some time to get some reading done. Aside from all the great posts I have bookmarked in my feed reader, I will be reading the new book by Eric Ries, “Incorruptible”. It’s about how the tendency to think short term in business destroys the longer term value creation, and how a shift in thinking is deeply needed. It is right down my own alley, so I will be looking forward to this one. The other one, I will be consuming is “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump”. I don’t know if it will be fun per se. It will probably be most scary. But it is hard to deny that the drama that is unfolding is in its own way errily fascinating.

I am also hoping that in between the vacational activities and the reading, I will get an opportunity to keep my running…well, running. I have gotten into a really good streak, and I am way ahead of the otherwise ambitious plan, I set for the year back at New Years.

Part of the reason is discipline, but another part is the Garmin Coach, I run with using my Garmin 255. It. Just. Works. The adaptive training it has to offer is a God sent for someone like me, and it helps me do what the coach orders. It is not often that I praise technology specifically, but I am really impressed with this coaching system. There, you have it!

Anyways, off to the beach! See you on the other side for what promises to be an exciting second half of the year.

[embed]