Client stories

  • Global Knowledge

    META have partnered with University College London and Global Knowledge to design and deliver an IT academy for one of the world’s leading luxury brand groups. The academy is designed to develop entrepreneurial potential and complex thinking skills in IT managers throughout all of the organisation’s brands. Every year, managers take part in a series of workshops created to nurture innovative thinking as well as the ability to deal with the fast-changing world of technology and work.

  • Boehringer Ingelheim

    Boehringer Ingelheim use META as part of a unique US-wide initiative to understand the psychological determinants of complex or systemic thinking. This 2-year project involves the development of a comprehensive data protocol to quantify intrapreneurial talent and detect its potential. In all, 500 Boehringer Ingelheim employees will participate and results will be reported in an academic paper that will advance BI’s understanding of the values, abilities, and dispositions that facilitate corporate innovation.

  • Unilever

    The Unilever Foundry is an initiative which enables employees and teams to collaborate with start-ups and innovative technology companies. As part of The Foundry launch, Unilever offered its people the opportunity to mentor entrepreneurs. And as part of that process it also offered its people the opportunity to understand their own entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses by completing META. We produced a customised version of META for Unilever, together with a branded micro-site to deliver the test. Every respondent who completed the test received a report detailing their strengths and weaknesses in key facets of their personality and recommending ways in which they could develop their entrepreneurial skills.

  • Visual DNA

    VisualDNA is an audience insights company with patented technology that makes it possible for businesses to understand people online. It has developed an incredibly efficient and unique method of understanding, driven by the science of converting data from personality quizzes into rich, accurate and scalable audience profiles. Creativity is the currency of its business and VDNA wanted to better understand the creative profile of key staff, the make-up and balance of its teams, and where hidden entrepreneurial talent might exist. META profiled the entire company and then our consultants briefed senior management and interviewed key personnel. The end result is that VDNA has a better understanding both of its creative hot-spots and its entrepreneurial talent.

  • Digicel

    Digicel is a mobile phone network provider operating in 31 markets across the Caribbean, Central America, and Oceania regions. Since its inception Digicel has grown rapidly and this growth has been characterised by creativity, opportunism, drive and vision, the essential components of entrepreneurial activity. The challenge for Digicel is to maintain this growth and key to this is a leadership team that exhibit entrepreneurial characteristics. Meta’s intervention comprised two main elements: Personal assessment via the META test; and a ½ day workshop designed to explore the results of the assessments and the wider implications for the team and for the organization. Both the tests and the workshop were designed to deliver actionable recommendations both for individuals and for the organization, with leaders taking away a series of specific recommendations in respect of both their own behaviours and the culture of the area of the business they are responsible for.

  • Sainsbury's supermarkets

    In order to innovate and grow within the field of Business Analytics, Sainsbury's used META and META-Culture to first identify entrepreneurial talent within its ranks and then to develop a culture that could support that talent. By understanding the entrepreneurial profiles of individual team members the composition of teams could be modified. By understanding the drivers and blockers in their organisational culture wider transformational change was made possible.

  • New Entrepreneurs Foundation

    The New Entrepreneurs Foundation (NEF) was established to create a new generation of outstanding entrepreneurs who will build market-leading businesses and play a key role in driving Britain’s future prosperity. NEF do this with a program that places chosen candidates in fast growing SMEs and combines this experience with intensive training, business mentoring and coaching. Each year NEF selects 30 young people to join its program and META plays a key role in its selection process. So far META has been used to assess 290 candidates.

  • Techstars

    The No1 start-up accelerator in the world – Techstars provides seed funding from over 75 top venture capital firms and angel investors, as well as mentoring from hundreds of the best entrepreneurs in the world. Each year 1000s of start-ups apply to become part of the program. Techstars used META to screen its most recent London intake, looking at both the strengths and weaknesses of individual respondents and at the balance of traits within the teams that make up each of the applicant companies. Techstars received Manager’s reports for each of the respondents, providing a framework for subsequent mentoring; and respondents themselves received reports, allowing them to consider ways in which they might build on their entrepreneurial strengths and address their entrepreneurial weaknesses.

  • Entrepreneurial Finance Lab

    The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) helps banks, incubators and other financial institutions to lend to entrepreneurs in the developing world, allowing them to measure risk and entrepreneurial potential among the un/under-banked. It uses a battery of psychometric tests in order to do this and META is its test of choice in terms of identifying entrepreneurial talent. EFL is active in developing countries across several continents and through its work META has been completed by over 100,000 people in 20 different countries. EFL’s CEO, Bailey Klinger, sits on Meta’s advisory board.

  • IFC/World Bank

    META is used as part of the screening strategy for the World Bank’s South to South Transfer of Youth Business Incubators program. The program is designed to identify and develop young entrepreneurs in India and, as well as helping to screen for entrepreneurial potential, META’s development framework also supports the mentoring of chosen candidates. In all, 100 fellows of the program were assessed via META in 2013. The World Bank plan to develop and expand the program in 2014 and 2015.