Connecting Entrepreneurs and VCs at the i7 Summit

Last week was the i7 Summit in Chantilly, just outside Paris, which brought together over 100 entrepreneurs, multinational corporations and VCs to tackle the topics of technology, innovation, entrepreneurship and society. The organizers, Avisé Partners, wanted to provide a highly interactive environment that shook people out of conventional thinking and embodied the spirit of innovation. frog partnered with i7 to run three rounds of parallel workshops (four at a time) using our frogThink methodology, with topics supplied by i7 to get people focused on a wide variety of pressing issues.

I think by all accounts the Summit was a great success. The location was a beautiful 19th century chateau and conference center owned by Cap Gemini. The audience was diverse and highly engaged. The speakers were universally interesting, provocative, and well-prepared. Several funding deals were initiated during the 1.5 days. The frog team working with me on it did a great job facilitating the workshops and helping the attendees come up with provocative new approaches to complex challenges. I gave the opening keynote, moderated a couple of panels, and oversaw the various workshops that my colleagues facilitated. The feedback from attendees about the novel format - which was a bit of an experiment for both frog and Avisé - was that they really enjoyed the interactive and stimulating combination of keynotes, company presentations, workshops and panel discussion. It made for some packed days!

There were several things that struck me as I listened to hundreds of conversations over the course of the Summit.

• A major goal of the Summit for Avisé (which works in both US and France) was to begin catalyzing entrepreneurial activity in France. Something I hadn't realized was that "entrepreneur" is almost a dirty word in France. Entrepreneurs are viewed with suspicion, are seen as outsiders who have not gone the more conventional route of working for an established firm. As a result the rate of new start-ups in France is exceptionally low.
• In addition, there is relatively little VC money ("oxygen" as one speaker put it) available in France, and what VC money there is comes largely (so far as I can tell) from corporate VC groups as opposed to independent investors. There were heads of a number of corporate VC arms present, including Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, and Bertelsmann Digital Media, offering their perspectives on the ups and downs of finding, funding and working with entrepreneurs in Europe.
• A common complaint (both from the start-up and the corporate side) is that the contract negotiations take months too long. One of the workshops proposed ways to dramatically speed up this process to a matter of days or hours. Often it is just as valuable to an entrepreneur to get a very quick "no" than to be strung along for months in ambiguity.
• Along with entrepreneur, "failure" is also clearly a dirty word in France and, to one extent or another, much of Europe. Many looked longingly at Silicon Valley and the US and the much more tolerant attitudes toward failure, encouragement of risk-taking. While sometimes failure is fetishized in the Bay Area at least, there's no denying that it is part of innovating, and any nation that wants to ramp up innovation is going to have to be more tolerant of failures.
• It was clear that there is a strong interest amongst Europeans, especially younger ones, to use and support entrepreneurship as a tool for social innovation and bettering the lives of others. One of the start-ups presenting that was received enthusiastically was WallaWater, which is finding innovative ways to very cheaply improve municipal water supplies in India to cut down on water-borne diseases.
• Lastly, my favorite quote of the conference came from Jean-Pierre Rives, a famous former professional rugby player who is now a sculptor. He made one of those wonderful malapropisms that often occur when people aren't speaking in their native language (he being French speaking in English) that end up being more meaningful than they may recognize at first. I think he was going for "duck out of water" as he was addressing a business audience. "I feel," he said instead, "like a duck in a shoe store." And don't we all, sometimes!

AVP of Marketing Strategy Adam Richardson is the author of Innovation X: Why a Company’s Toughest Problems are its Greatest Advantage. His book is the manual for leaders looking for clarity about the emerging challenges facing their businesses. You can follow Adam on Twitter @richardsona.