Nurturing your difference as an entrepreneur 🙋
How Laurent Didier uses his expertise to push companies further…
Designer, entrepreneur, coach, after a few different lives, Laurent Didier is putting his experience in the service of the startups from Incubateur HEC Paris, and today is sharing his insights with us.
Thank you for taking the time, Laurent, can you introduce yourself in a few words?
I am a mountain dweller, a father of 4, an ex-husband of 2, and a boyfriend of 1 (who is in Istanbul and that I have not seen for close to a year due to the COVID).
I graduated from HEC in 1979, and later became a certified design thinking expert from the d.School.
I pursued my career in marketing, communications, and design in big corporations at first; I have been working at an executive level since 1992, and as an entrepreneur since 1999.
I have worked as a manager within great companies: I started at Unilever since I wanted to work in marketing while being as knowledgeable as my clients.
I later went to work in the design industry, as a branding & packaging director for Dragon Rouge for 12 years. I then acquired a design company, which I re-sold to Dragon Rouge 5 years later.
I kept on working in design and strategic marketing with big corporations such as Nestlé, with which I was typically dealing with heads of strategic divisions, one level under the board of directors.
I gradually left the design industry, since there is a kind of age ceiling in that industry.
When I learned about Design Thinking at d.School, I understood that I wanted to enter the world of startups and small businesses; this is where value creation lies.
I help entrepreneurs and companies bring their innovation and transformation strategies to the next level.
Seems like you have led a busy life, what do you do today?
I help entrepreneurs and companies bring their innovation and transformation strategies to the next level, by making them more concrete, ergo easier to absorb by all company stakeholders. The first of those are company employees, but that also includes partners, clients, etc.
Carrying out that process enables faster roll-outs, mitigated risks, and fewer mistakes.
Could you share with us a few examples of Incubateur HEC Paris startups that you helped that way?
Let me get a few testimonies I gathered from last June, I believe they speak for themselves:
"Laurent was instrumental in working on our 'why?' beyond our 'how?'. He enabled us to visualize our mission on a greater time scale, through which we built our strategic compass that has not changed since."
Raphaël Vullierme - Luko
"During the first months of SpaceFill, working with Laurent enabled us to focus on the essential, i.e. sharing our value proposition to sell a premium service to actual clients."
Huzar - Spacefill
"Laurent pushes you to ask yourself the foundational questions for your company! By carrying out this questioning, and by articulating our strategy, we made clear our goals, for us, as well as for our teams."
Thomas Reynaud - GarantMe
First, I ask entrepreneurs to make a 2-minute pitch.
Let us dive into it, what is your approach?
My main focuses are value proposition and value creation.
First, I ask entrepreneurs to make a 2-minute pitch, and I mean exactly 2 minutes. It makes a fantastic first assessment.
Each time an entrepreneur asks a question, we make sure to address that question and to solve it.
We always contrast that question with the 'Why?' of the company, to help the entrepreneur look ahead and explore other adjacent questions.
Step by step, I have built a method and synthesized it to create a product: Puzzle'uP 6 by Baraca.
What learnings did you acquire from your experiences with entrepreneurs?
They are all pretty sharp.
They come with both great ideas and great minds to execute them. Sometimes they lack structure, but that is why we are there.
I notice that some of them are better at executing some phases.
Starting from a blurry image, one must combine all pieces as one would a puzzle.
Here are the three key factors I have observed:
Be different. We train entrepreneurs to find and nurture their difference.
Meet users' needs. We bring entrepreneurs to test their ideas with users to pinpoint a precise value proposition.
Combine all criteria to accelerate. One must inspire first, before evangelizing their environment. Entrepreneurs must be able to rally all their communities, which relies less on pure authority than on collective persuasion.
For each of these key factors, a strong vision leads to success, and one must always balance between strategy and action. By finding the sweet spot, one can move quite fast.
I merely want to support the ones who can shake the world and to redraw the map.
What are your projects and ambitions?
On the personal side, I have 4 children, between 34 and 18 years old. If I had to select my best achievement, it would be them. My job now is to ensure that the world of tomorrow is one of which they can take ownership.
From these premises, I believe it urgent to shake the system, I believe that only entrepreneurs are empowered to do so, as all others have vested interests in the status quo, they cannot act objectively.
I merely want to support the ones who can shake the world and to redraw the map. If I can contribute to that, and make champions out of them, I will consider myself useful and happy.
Can you tell us more about your role with HEC Alumni?
I am the president of the Entrepreneurship Hub, which includes 8 clubs, 4000 members, 80 events per year (of which Les Mercure HEC competition is the heyday), and 35 webinars during the lockdown (gathering 2500 participants).
We created the AFIP sessions, during which HEC entrepreneurs can meet with domain experts.
The Hub carries out several missions:
We foster entrepreneurial initiatives, such as "find your co-founder" meetings.
We provide a place of sharing and mutual aid, where one does not ask for solutions, but introductions.
We focus on creating a fruitful system.
HEC entrepreneurship went from being a statistical anomaly to becoming a viral spread and finally to turning into an exhilarating pandemic. We believe that every unreasonable idea works thanks to initiatives taken by entrepreneurs such as Ford, Edison, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, etc.
At HEC Paris, we had an unreasonable idea: the Startup Launchpad. They did not get much support at first, and now… what a success!
Differently, the Incubateur is impressive in its scale. Starting from a dozen people looking for a place to gather in the school a few years ago, today it comprises more than 200 desks and 80 incubated startups… and it is only the beginning.
My main focus at the Entrepreneurship Hub is to support the projects we spot in the field and to create a breeding ground for them to emerge.
In the 5 years to come, we will have to support a radical change in entrepreneurs and the ambition of their projects, I believe that the HEC community will count many impressive successes before then.
Pitch your startup wearing only your underpants and a blazer.
Do you have any stories to share from your time in the startup ecosystem?
When we organized the first HEC Alumni x Google Barcamp event with Jacques Birol, to exemplify the importance of nurturing difference, we created a mixed crowd of tech people and business people (with students from Polytechnique, Epitech, 42, and Telecom Paris). Among the participants were future ecosystem stars (such as Stanislas Niox-Chateau or Céline Lazorthes), as well as young entrepreneurs.
During that event, we created the "Blazer pitch" sessions: pitch your startup wearing only your underpants and a blazer. The experience was incredible, the 350 participants quickly forgetting that the speakers were in their underpants, as their moxie superseded everything!
What we learned that day was that you always must have a physical item symbolic of your value proposition to show during your presentation!
You can see how Arthur Mesnard does it with Spartan (now Lambs):
Or how Élodie Grimoins from Urban Canopee applies it:
Did your mindset change since the time you were working with big companies in the '80s and '90s?
Obviously, yes, radically. Back then, everything was predictable, growth was ubiquitous, and resources were plentiful. The dominant paradigm was "The bigger the better".
Today the paradigm has shifted: fewer resources are available, the economy is in decline, and everything is uncertain.
Likewise, our relationship model changed profoundly, as illustrated by Hugh MacLeod, the famous Silicon Valley cartoonist:
Nurture your difference!
Based on all these changes, what piece of advice would you share with any entrepreneur?
Nurture your difference! Companies that present themselves as "tech" or "impact" ones are not showcasing difference. They believe those labels are enough to create an identity, they are not.
If I had to create an incubator or accelerator today, the culture of difference would be my foundation stone.
And if you were back in these shoes, what would your design agency look like today?
I would put desire at the heart of everything, it is what begets every other emotion.
Without desire, you have neither longing nor enjoyment. Without longing, you will not buy anything.
Within each product lies an idiosyncrasy that differentiates it and makes it worthwhile marketing-wise.
Finding that uniqueness and making it outstanding and desirable would be my strategy, I would create «L'Atelier du Désir».
I would put desire at the heart of everything.
Before we say goodbye, how have the last few months impacted you?
I would love to talk about my learning at the incubator. During the first lockdown, I used my experience with startups to help SMEs.
Since that crisis was out of the ordinary, it required unconventional solutions. Usually, with startups, I help them solidify their hypergrowth in a chaotic environment; with SMEs, I adapted and synthesized my usual approach to help them face the unknown and rally their staff through their trouble.
Upstream, we focus on the "Why?", on identifying the keystones, and downstream we apply big companies' organization methods (regarding priorities and roadmaps), but through the involvement of all employees in planning for the future.
My wish is for all these companies, whatever their size, to make it through the crisis stronger and with new opportunities.