Top 50 Emerging Leaders 2022 (in alphabetical order by CVC unit): Chris Lindener, head, Airbus Scale
Christian Lindener is the head of Airbus Scale, Netherlands-headquartered aerospace and defence group Airbus’ startup accelerator and corporate venturing arm, where he leads business-building and venturing activities and drives innovation across global technology ecosystems.
Lindener told Sifted in November 2021 that Airbus Scale intends to produce three unicorns a year, which involves spinning out non-core technologies from its research and development (R&D) labs as independent companies.
Lindener was quoted by Sifted as saying: “We had these intrapreneurship programmes (BizLab accelerator) and innovation programmes (InnovationX) running all over the company and we said hey, let us pull them all together and see if we have everything that we need.
“The missing part was to really make the innovations happen – we are going very deep into company building. Airbus has amazing technologies that we do not always do anything with. We are going to identify those technologies, pull them out of the company, build a team around them — hiring externally as well as internally.
“VCs are seeing this as a new asset class – taking projects from big corporates, especially R&D-heavy ones – and building the last mile themselves to turn them into companies.”
Before joining Airbus in late 2019, Lindener served as managing director for Wayra Germany, a Munich-based corporate venture capital (CVC) arm of telecommunications firm Telefónica focused on startup scaling and pre-scale investing.
In this role, he oversaw the strategic direction of the organisation and managed the selection of startups and young technology corporations to be integrated into Telefónica’s portfolio.
Spending a significant part of his career as an independent consultant in the tech space, Lindener created and advised more than 20 startup incubator and accelerator schemes in Switzerland, Austria and Germany.
