Hans Hedin, Chairman of the Board & UAV-Pilot, Swedish Rescue Drones
Hans Hedin has worked within and promoted the field of strategic competitive intelligence for almost 25 years. He started as a Ph.D. student and lecturer in the field of corporate/business intelligence & security at Lund university in the early 1990s focusing his research on how Swedish companies like Ericsson, Tetra Pak, Volvo, Electrolux, Gambro, Telia and others, organized and executed their intelligence operations. He was one of the first to publish in-depth cases regarding how Swedish and European companies utilized intelligence to reach competitive advantage. In 1994, he was awarded the Wallenberg Scholarship for his research. He had professor Stevan Dedijer (the Grandfather of Corporate/Business Intelligence) and William Colby (CIA Director 1973-1976) as mentors who provided Hans with both valuable insights related to governmental and corporate intelligence as well as connected him into the global contact network related to intelligence.
From 1995-2003 Hans worked as intelligence consultant and partner at Docere Intelligence and pioneered the field of intelligence in Sweden. He developed both a methodology for implementing intelligence programs in organizations as well as a wide intelligence education program including courses such as Intelligence Program Development, Scenario Analysis, Industry Analysis, Company & Product Analysis. With over 15 courses on the menu, it was the largest intelligence education program in Europe between 1999-2003.
In 2003, Hans took the role as Vice President Business Development at Global Intelligence Alliance and began a very interesting and successful business journey together with the others in the management team. Starting in 2003 with four employees and one office in Helsinki, Finland and finishing in 2014, when the company was acquired by M-Brain, with 140 employees and offices in London, Essen, Toronto, New York, Sao Paolo, Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Helsinki; truly a mark of a successful business endeavour.
As a part of that development, Hans had developed the Global Intelligence Alliance Network which consisted of over 100 companies as GIA Members or GIA Research Partners and with over 1.500 people in roles such as analysts, researchers, industry experts, intelligence consultants. Hans was said to be the “best networked intelligence person in the world”. Hans was also Conference Chairman for the GIA Intelligence Best Practices conference in Europe and North America during 2009-2013. Hans was also a speaker that was much in demand with companies as well as academic institutions. He was for many years guest lecturer at the Royal School of Engineers (KTH) Executive Education and at The Lund School of Engineers (LTH) where he intrigued students with stories about creative analysis, future thinking and intelligence operations. In 2011, the “Handbook of Market Intelligence” was published in which Hans´s methodology “World Class Intelligence Roadmap” was presented. This methodology has been used by over 2.000 organisations from 2009 to today in order to develop a true intelligence capability.
During this period, Hans was very much involved with SCIP (Strategic & Competitive Intelligence Professionals) in roles such as SCIP Scandinavia Coordinator, workshop leader and presenter at SCIP conferences starting with the international conference in Phoenix in 1995. Hans has presented papers on a variety of topics such as creative thinking, scenario analysis, technology intelligence, recruiting & training intelligence professionals in addition to his key theme; intelligence program development.
Between 2014-2017, Hans worked together with Comintelli, the Swedish Intelligence Software firm. He was chairman of the “Intelligence Day” conferences from 2014-2017 as well as advising companies how to develop intelligence programs. In this period, he also started a career in photography working with sports-, real estate-, intelligence- and drone photography. He also studied crisis management at the Swedish Defence University in order to broaden his perspective from corporate to societal and humanitarian issues.
In 2018, Hans connected his experience related to intelligence, photography and UAV/drone piloting and is now working as Chairman of the Board at Swedish Rescue Drones (SRD). SRD is a non-profit association with over 1.000 UAV/Drone pilots that support organisations such as FIKK (Crisis & Catastrophe Volunteers), Missing People, the Police and Rescue-/Firefighting units with aerial intelligence related to search & rescue operations and wildfire surveillance, fire monitoring, emergency drone intelligence and other services.
And with that, a new chapter has begun…