Munich, 26.06.2020 - Innoactive has welcomed another great member to the team - Graham Breen. The former Head of Content at HTC Vive becomes the new Business Development and Partnership Lead. We invited Graham to tell us more about his motivation to join the startup world and about his views on the future of VR.
Natalia Repta: I would like to start the interview by welcoming you on board! We are thrilled to have you and learn with and from you.
Graham Breen: I am very happy to be here. It's been an exciting first week and I am looking forward to dive into this new adventure.
I would like to start with a quote from your Linkedin profile: You are inspired by turning dreams into reality. How many dreams have you already turned into reality? What are your dreams and wishes for the VR industry?
One of the amazing things with VR is that it lets people create any reality. When I first tried it like many others it completely blew my mind open to some of the possibilities that could be achieved. As well as leaving the headset with a big smile I left with 100 ideas of what it could inspire. As time has gone by I’ve become more convinced about the practical applications of VR, solving challenges that in the real world are either not possible or incredibly cost prohibited.
I’m really looking forward to seeing VR becoming an every day tool that people use in parts of their work like they would a laptop or a phone. Within some organizations this engagement has already started but there are still a lot of companies who could benefit hugely from using VR.
I have been working with you on several projects and enjoyed our collaboration a lot. I was thrilled to hear you will be joining the Innoactive team. Having said that I was also wondering about your motivation to work in a startup environment?
I’ve worked with a lot of startups in recent years and always been really inspired by the energy and ‘can do’ approach that they bring. It’s something I really enjoy having in my working life. I‘ve also been lucky to work closely with Innoactive a few times on projects or at trade shows and found them to be one of the most professional and well focussed startups that I’ve come across. Therefore when the opportunity to join you arose, it really was a no brainer for me.
Innoactive provides a VR training software platform and our mission is to help enterprises scale VR training. How do you think VR will change training as we know it now and how companies like Innoactive will be supporting the employee training process?
We’ve already seen a lot of companies across different industries embrace VR training. It really makes sense when traditional training methods are too expensive or dangerous and also where consistency of training experience or measurability of behavior is crucial. However something that I’ve heard a lot over recent years is that the time and cost for producing high quality training software is too high to scale more widely. This is a great opportunity where the Innoactive Creator can really help by simplifying the content creation process which will allow enterprises to deploy even more cost efficient training. Of course another challenge is deploying content more widely across organizations and locations which is addressed by the Innoactive Portal.
At Innoactive we decided a long time ago that we want to be part of the transformation and help push VR not as a company but as a collective. So we started connecting people through various roundtables and online events such as the VR Training Summit. You were always the first to join all the initiatives. Your experience and expertise were invaluable to help spread the word about the importance of VR training. How else would you like to impact the industry as our new Business Development and Partnerships Lead?
With any new technology it’s important to share best practices and experience so I was really pleased in the past to support the Innoactive Training Summit. I always found it interesting to hear how others had overcome challenges and the learnings I could take from that. I also found it inspiring to listen to some of the leading voices in the industry.
This is an important time for the growth and wider adoption of VR whilst it’s still relatively young that companies work together to increase the industry size.
2020 was definitely a difficult and challenging year but it also made us think differently. It seems like more opportunities opened up for VR to become an every day tool. What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Yes, 2020 has been and continues to be a difficult year for everyone. Looking from the VR perspective some areas have faced issues whilst others have been able to take advantage of the opportunities presented. For large and complex companies the need to train their employees doesn’t go away but actually becomes more important than ever. As technology is evolving again we’re starting to see barriers falling, headsets are becoming better and more affordable, the promise of 5G opens even more possibilities.
More than ever it’s important for organizations to embrace innovation and look at new ways of doing things. We’re still less than 5 years into mass availability of commercial VR headsets and we’ve already seen so much change in how companies are using them. Looking ahead to the next 5 years we can expect this adoption to speed up changing VR from the novelty to the norm.
Thank you for the chat Graham!
Press Contact
Innoactive GmbH
Natalia Repta
+49 89 2154 870-52
About Innoactive
Innoactive is a leading software-as-a-service company that helps enterprises to streamline their transformation of employee training with Virtual Reality. Innoactive enables industry leaders to standardize and scale the creation and deployment of VR learning experiences. The Volkswagen Group, Linde, Lufthansa, Deutsche Bahn, Fraport, AeroGround at Munich Airport are some of the customers trusting Innoactive. At the core of the company stands a team of forward thinkers based in Munich, driven by the purpose of bringing VR to industrial workplaces: innoactive.io
About Graham Breen
Graham has been working across new technology and content from inception to market. He has a long term experience from the telecommunications industry before moving to VR as the first Vive employee in Europe. Inspired by turning dreams into reality. Graham has work experience in both UK and Germany and fluent in both of these languages. He joined the Innoactive team in September 2020.
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