A few weeks ago Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder announced a 10 billion dollar investment fund geared towards transitioning our economy into a greener one. But, how does 10 billion dollars measure up to capital needs required to building a green economy? What could Amazon bring to the green transition? And finally, is there any kind of contradiction between Amazon current operating model and building…
Yes, adding capacity is a must, but minimizing risks proves crucial too Building additional capacity is only addressing part of the issue. The ecosystem here in France would surely benefit from boosting capital efficiency ; that’s the value created per dollar invested. Turning 5 billion euros to 15 billion euros starts with making each dollar count and mitigate risks. According to Crunchbase and the Journal of Empirical…
Building unicorns: sure! But why? How is the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, planning on creating an innovation ecosystem conducive to giving birth to 25 unicorns by 2025? What is it about the existing French economy that must be overhauled? And why is it important for France to be producing unicorns in the first place? How does this tie into value creation and jobs?…
What are the strategies for investing in innovation? How to provide access to opportunity while managing risks carefully? I used to think that the Net Present Value (NPV) metric was the best to enable value generation while minimizing risks. But, innovation investment expert, Claus Hirzmann thinks otherwise. He told me why in a recent conversation at Vivatech. It’s all here ! Please introduce yourself…
How to create scale-ups in Europe? What should Europe do to foster a promising technology ecosystem? How to evolve the blossoming startup ecosystem in France to one of Scale-ups? Which current startup stands the highest change of turning into a scale-up ? Why is it that Europe has, so far, failed to generate numerous unicorns while Silicon Valley—a small area of only 2.7 million…
Why has France embarked upon the project of taxing Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple and devised a tax that is a specific to digital players also known as the GAFA Tax? And why has France decided to go it alone, despite its long-held belief in European cohesion and unity? I addressed this and more with France 24 journalist, Julia Sieger. I/ Why is there…
How to innovate in large companies? This simple question turns out to be much more complex than expected, as global players are focused on executing a proven business model rather than searching for a new one whose profitability is untested. These are some of the issues that Andreas Page, Senior Manager in charge of Digital Business Development at Swisscom and myself discussed recently. Presentation…
The Debate on France 24 On December 24, 2018, I took part in “The Debate” of France 24, the French BBC. With a few other experts, we talked about the long view on Amazon and we wondered whether the company was overvalued, and how it is changing our day-to-day lives. I will not go into the details that we discussed during the show. The question…
In December 2018, I was invited to be part of the Joint European Disruptive Initiative (JEDI). As discussed in a previous post in French, the Jedi organization aims at reproducing America’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in Europe. Technology leadership Today, according to André Loesekrug-Pietri, the founder of JEDI, Europe is “losing the technological battle”. As shown below, eight out of the 10…
Digital technologies should create approximately $1210, billion by 2025 according to seven investment reports. The document below shows how valuable is distributed by technology and by industry. It also focuses on what it means for a company‘s value chain. I show that every single segment in the value chain, from resource acquisition to distribution, will benefit from digital innovation. In addition, I focus on…