Watch the latest testimonial from Ariane Chan – Open Innovation at Orange Belgium on Orange’s Smart City Innovation Challenge
Discover how Orange Fab is using Novable’s startup scouting services. The company focuses on reaching high levels of corporate innovation through collaboration.
Ariane Chan is the innovation and start-up manager at Orange Fab BeLux. In this interview, she unfolds the story of her experience with the scouting service offered by the Novable platform. Moreover, she explains how the Novable team was able to meet the needs of Orange Fab.
A: Orange Fab BeLux is the Orange start-ups accelerator in Belgium and Luxembourg,
Our mission is to implement win-win partnerships between start-ups and Orange Business Units. Each year, we select a few start-ups to join our free 6-month accelerator program. During this period, we help start-ups answer their challenges by giving them access to our network, internal experts, and other various resources. Since the creation in 2016, we accelerated 16 start-ups.
The Orange Fab BeLux belongs to the global Orange corporate accelerator network present in 18 countries on 4 continents across the globe.
A: Our goal for this 2022 season is to propose new experiences to our Orange end-customers in Belgium and Luxembourg that will show how 5G can have a positive impact on their daily life.
To reach this goal, we were looking for start-ups able to propose inventive solutions using virtual reality, augmented reality, or acting in the metaverse. More than the technology, we also targeted areas of gaming, sportech, digital health, or digital shops to be closer to our customers.
As you can see, our expectations were pretty high. Adding to that, we only accelerate start-ups based in Belgium and Luxembourg with a limited number of employees and a market-fit product.
For the previous seasons, we searched online. However, considering the specificities of this year’s theme, our candidates’ profile prerequisites, and the lack of time, we were open to a solution that would speed up the process, allowing us to focus on other tasks.
For this reason, we were curious to discover the added value of the startup scouting service offered by Novable. In the beginning, we were unsure of the solution. But we decided to give it a go and were finally positively surprised.
A: Through its platform, Novable was able to propose to us over 60 start-ups answering our various criteria. A great result. We reviewed, carefully analyzed, and had interviews with a dozen of them.
In the end, 6 start-ups that Novable discovered for us were presented to our pre-jury alongside start-ups we looked for by ourselves and some that applied spontaneously.
Then, the short-listed companies were invited to pitch their project. We finally selected one from the Novable selection to join our accelerator program this year! We are very satisfied with the Novable platform and team support, especially taking into consideration the nature of the challenge.
A: We particularly appreciated the constant assistance provided by the Novable Agents, who supported us in the use of the Novable platform through weekly meetings. They made sure the discussions on the subjects and the quality of the results were satisfactory. Moreover, the additional value given by the human factor assured a progressive real-time assessment and filtering activity, facilitating the whole process toward high levels of corporate innovation.
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