Stories from the Field: Using the Canvas to Develop Strategy & Model the Future

Flourishing Business Community
Speakers Series: Stories from the Field #02

Using the Canvas to Develop Strategy & Model the Future with Jan Helge Viste & Egil Norman Olsen

Date: Tuesday May 9

Time: 15h00 UTC – 08h00 PST, 11h00 EDT, 16h00 GMT, 17h00 CET, 01h00 JST (+1 day)

Duration: 1 hour

Registration: Required via Eventbrite at

For our second new monthly flourishing business community speaker series: stories from the field, the community is delighted to welcome Jan Helge Viste from GCE NODE and Egil Norman Olsen from CR Group.

GCE NODE is an industry-driven cluster for ocean technologies. Based in Southern Norway, GCE NODE comprises approximately 120 companies, most of which constitute a world-leading value chain of suppliers to the oil & gas, offshore, energy and maritime industries. The cluster is dedicated to increasing and facilitating world-class competency by offering insight into market developments, new industry opportunities and transfer of technology from the oil & gas sector to offshore renewables and other emerging markets and industries.

At GCE NODE Jan Helge Viste is responsible for digitalization and business development in the NODE cluster. He has long experience from the industry (IT, Telecom, Oil & gas), including running his own company for ten years. He has his M.Sc. from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology within the field of numerical mathematics. He has also been working a couple of years with a Ph.D. on Information Systems at the University of Agder (Norway).

CR Group AS is a consulting company with the business idea to get our customers’ strategies to work. We provide services to managers and management teams, with special focus on recruitment, leadership training and issues related to development and change.

Egil Norman Olsen is partner in CR Group, and co-founder of StrateGaia AS. He holds a Bachelor degree in electronics Engineering from Norwegian School of Engineering in Trondheim with additional education in economics and management. He has a broad experience in business operation both in Norway and abroad with change management, strategy processes and company start-ups.

In 2017 GCE NODE established a “business development lab” (aka “strategy development programme”) with the aim of increasing the competitiveness of NODE’s member companies. The main focus of the lab has been to strengthen and help “ordinary” companies with management teams that have so far not systematically thought much about how the megatrends (climate and digitalization) will affect company viability. Egil has been the lab leader for all these groups, and Jan Helge has been project owner and one of the coaches. To date 22 member company leadership groups have benefited from the business development lab experience, each quite different in size, area of services and products, and maturity.

In their talk, Egil and Jan Helge will focus on their experiences using the Flourishing Business Canvas as a crucial tool in a series of leadership group strategy development and future modeling events in the Business Development Lab, including:

• What is the objective when using the Canvas with GCE NODE member companies?
• What is the business development lab experience and how it different from training?
• How did GCE NODE and CR Group train their staff to use the Canvas?
• How have member companies leadership teams reacted to the Canvas?
• What results have member companies achieved?
• What is exciting and challenging about the Canvas?
• What does GCE NODE and CR Group hope to gain from participating in the Flourishing Business Community?
• What can GCE NODE and CR Group offer to the community?

At the end of his talk Jan Helge and Egil will take questions from members of the community.

After the event a video of the talk plus any slides will be shared in the “Speaker Series” space of the Flourishing Business Community. Please join other flourishing business leaders and become a full member to access.