WHO ARE THE DISRUPTORS DEFINING THE BUSINESSES OF TOMORROW ?
WHY ONLY 12% OF THE FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES OF THE 1950S STILL EXIST TODAY ?
WHY UBER WAS NOT INVENTED BY A TAXI COMPANY, AND AIRBNB BY A HOTEL CHAIN ?
HOW CAN INDUSTRY SPECIFIC INEFFICIENCIES BECOME NEW BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES ?
HOW CAN CORPORATIONS GAIN NEW PERSPECTIVES AND THINKING TO AVOID THE DESTINY OF KODAK ?
We work in partnership with our clients by engaging their teams to create new business opportunities. Together we connect dots on trends, uncover problems “worth solving” for end-users and design solutions with a creative yet pragmatic mindset.
Pathfinder offers the agility of a start-up and the operational knowledge of a multinational company. Our unique ecosystem, using digital as a primary mean, fosters an environment that naturally drives innovation and creates the culture needed to build sustainable and scalable businesses.
Jérémie Rombaut / Founder
Jérémie, after a bicultural education (India/Swiss), has spent more than 10 years working for a leading multinational company, across both mature and emerging markets. He has held general management and specialized positions in new business innovation, growth, marketing and operations. With his knowledge of how large companies operate, he has a proven track record in creating successful corporate start-ups. Engaging people through an “out of the box” mindset has been at the heart of all his result-driven ventures, including managing a non-profit association hospital taking care of 24 000 people per year in Rishikesh (India) and a school educating 225 children every year in New Delhi.
At Pathfinder, we believe in bringing together the right partners who can provide the best resources when they’re needed during the creation of a new startup business, whether at the ideation, prototyping or development stages. We also work with independent start-ups interested in accelerating their growth through “venture client” opportunities.
Pathfinder has created 10 corporate start-ups across Europe, in the last 18 months.
Pathfinder is a truly collaborative and co-creative process. It starts by actively listening to our clients and evolves by identifying their needs and understanding their specificities in order to set up a customized experience. Our overarching goal is to deliver a performing business within 18 months. The timeline below offers an example of programs we have executed to date.
1ST MONTH
Set up
the program
-
Co-creation, internal design, leadership and
start-up fund
3RD
Start
ideation
Prototype
Identifying real customer problems “worth
solving” with the frontline
6TH
Going live
with beta
MVP
1 customer,
1 problem,
1 solution
12TH
First revenues
& first pulse
First revenues
An idea is worth if someone is ready to pay for it, otherwise we pivot
18TH
Start-up
ready for scale
-
Scale to new customer segments and/or new
countries
Making the choice of the few by selecting the ideas based on problems “worth solving”
and the essential features in a first version of the prototype.
Rapid prototyping using dynamic, collaborative approaches, like hackathon.
Developing and launching the Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) in an agile mode,
within 3 months. Allowing to test and learn, or, if inevitable, fail fast and cheap.
In parallel, preparing the organization necessary to run the new startup with the right
interfaces, and to be able to plug it in the main businesses’ operational base.
Assuring continuous activity until the first “pulse” or revenues and, if needed, pivoting in
order to find the adequate monetization model.
Case study
Multinational constructing company
Corporate Start-up program Design & Fund
15
Countries
in a full-running program
10
startups
funded and delivered
+200
People
working collaboratively
There is a “before” and an “after” in Digital. And it is reshaping existing business models across industries faster than any other trend in the past. At Pathfinder, we believe that large established companies are actually best suited to lead change, create value and reboot their businesses.
Start-ups fundamentally win in their ability to generate real insights from the frontline, to challenge the existing and to grow fast. Pathfinder enables large corporations to cultivate this capacity with a truly “bottom up” approach that has been proven more effective, both in terms of engaging people and the speed to scale.
