EDF Pulse Incubation has been running for nearly 6 years. With nearly 15 projects incubated since its creation and no fewer than 7 subsidiaries created, the program enables EDF Group employees to experience a real entrepreneurial adventure and create new businesses capable of changing the world. How do you explain the program's success? Firstly because of its openness to the outside world.
Entrepreneurship programs within large groups often fall into the trap of being nothing more than in-house ideas laboratories, aimed solely at employees, with their own skills, with the aim of testing innovative ideas... in-house.
For EDF Pulse Incubation, an incubated project can only create real business and therefore real added value if it is connected to its market and its external environment. The strength of an entrepreneurship program such as EDF Pulse Incubation lies in its ability to combine in-house skills with an openness to the outside world.
EDF Pulse Incubation: 360° support for teams and projects
Guided by a dedicated incubation project manager, entrepreneurs benefit from comprehensive support from EDF Pulse Incubation as soon as they join the program: contact with the Group's various business lines, access to internal resources and skills (purchasing, legal, technical, sales, etc.), provision of tools and methods to help them move forward with their project and rapidly develop their skills, and funding for initial developments during their incubation period. However, none of this is enough without the entrepreneur and his or her project constantly confronting the outside market and prospects. To be able to create new businesses, the entrepreneurship program encourages the "test and learn" method, which means constantly adapting to one's environment, the real needs of one's customers and the offerings of one's competitors, in order to propose a solution with real added value.
EDF Pulse Incubation and external firms: two major benefits.
EDF Pulse Incubation works with several external firms specialized in startup acceleration to complement its support for startups. Firstly, this enables them to benefit from skills that the EDF Group doesn't have: technical, sectoral and methodological expertise. But above all, it gives them access to a network of kindly prospects and entrepreneurs ready to share their best practices, so that they can get to market as quickly as possible.
We support our incubatees in the 4 dimensions of an entrepreneurial project: the market, by opening the doors to our network of customers so that they can challenge their solution with benevolent prospects; the construction of the offer, thanks to various methodologies and expertise; the construction of the business plan; and of course, human support (...). Our aim is to increase the skills of intrapreneurs.
Our common goal? Raise the skills of our intrapreneurs and create projects capable of changing the world!