Blog
Start Bridge
posted on 1 Aug 2021
I really enjoyed my eleven years at Royal Dutch Shell. There was a lot of learning, building, and fun to be had. I loved working with extremely innovative teams that cared about their end-users and worked hard to deliver innovative software solutions.
Now, it is time for me to learn some more, build some more, and have quite a bit of fun by founding a startup to address frictions and inefficiencies prevailing during the promotion and evaluation of innovations and enabling a collaborative marketplace where all innovation ecosystem stakeholders can exchange and flourish.
Innovators come in many forms. They are inventors preparing prototypes in their garage, students groups mentored by incubators to run a university spin-off startup, mid-career domain experts leaving full-time jobs to launch new ventures so they can address known specific industrial pain points or team members in large organization innovation departments mandated to monetize corporate research and development. All those innovators have to go through a similar, often frustrating, and complicated process of convincing peers, partners, investors, and clients about the value of innovation in terms of technology readiness, commercialization models, competitive scoping, market size, and fit, or intellectual property.
Pitching innovation is frustrating because intrinsic risks associated with a specific innovation put innovators in a disadvantageous and unequal negotiation position. Innovators spend most of their time and effort de-risking their venture by leveraging their own experience, past successes, proofs-of-concept, patents, first clients’ referrals, etc.
This results in a very asymmetrical situation, similar to a courtroom, where per default, the innovator takes on the “accused” role and must overcome all doubts and reservations expressed by their audience and fight many cognitive biases against new things. It is all about creating trust. On the other hand, their targeted audience takes on the “accusers” role, and they are evaluating innovation based on their own expertise, interest, and experience.
Start Bridge idea is to assist innovators in marketing time-limited commercial offerings (“bridges”). Innovators can invite their professional network to review and comment on those offerings before introducing them to the marketplace. Bridges will help innovators promote, evaluate and monetize their innovation while building their reputation. Our motive is to shift the innovator and their audience from an “accused” and “accusers” relationship to a “seller” and “buyer” relationship while leveraging existing and widely proven sales techniques.
Skies
posted on 12 Apr 2021
Photography is all about the topic. I was reminded that skies and clouds can be relaxing and make one feel alive. This inspired me to share a few of my skies photos.
Miss Faline
posted on 4 Jan 2021
Faline is the name of Bambi’s friend in Disney animation film. It is also the name given to our chihuahua as she vaguely resembles a deer. We love her and since I have a few photos of her, I thought I would share.
Little house on the prairie
posted on 27 Dec 2020
Over Christmas, we rented a small historical farm house in Warrenton (near Round Top, Texas). Our goal was to be away from the city for a week, relax, and cook some nice meals. Our signature dish for that week was our boar stew with polenta.
Photography
posted on 25 Nov 2020
I figured out a way to add nicely formatted photo galleries to this site. The first one displays pictures I shot in Iceland.
Hello world (again)
posted on 22 Nov 2020
It is time for me to refresh this website. I am attempting a simpler and cleaner look, with English and French pages.
On here, you will learn about me and some of my hobbies such as cooking.