13th February 2020

Entrepreneurship: addressing future needs through innovation and technology

NEOFACTO has been assisting companies with their digitalisation since 2000 in Luxembourg, navigating its way between the creativity of start-ups and the experience of major groups.

As a provider of engineering services, we cannot make do with simply observing and following the market. We need to stay continually alert in order to maintain our innovative and pragmatic outlook.

The first stage in this process is continuously analysing our customers' requests to plan ahead for the skills needed in tomorrow's projects. Our unique business and start-up incubator model enables us to conduct our own research by performing preview tests of the latest innovations and cutting-edge areas of technology in concrete scenarios applicable on the market.

Accordingly, we are able to give our customers and employees a type of Luxembourg market prediction.

This is organised in three stages:

The technology watch

Our first monitoring tool is reverse mentoring, meaning that we view our new recruits as ambassadors of novelty. We pay attention to their interests and activities, which serves as our main source of raw information. This proactive intelligence gathering is now an integral part of our company and is in particular a virtuous circle based on attentiveness, curiosity and practical application.

We are also involved in several prestigious IT schools, with which we have formed partnerships: firstly, to present our hybrid model and inform students about the realities of the market for innovation and new technologies; secondly, to be attentive to the future generation of computer engineers overflowing with ideas and creativity.

The training of people

Because technology is continuously and exponentially progressing, training computer engineers is both mandatory and complicated.

Firstly, because technologies are always evolving, keeping up with this frenetic pace is a demanding daily endeavour. Secondly, because we see that traditional training is progressively making way for new online training.

Although the video training format is now very popular, it often is too theoretical. Without practical application, it does not necessarily result in real learning. This is why we decided to train by developing start-ups and innovative projects at our customers' sites under real-life conditions.

Resources are provided by a "volunteering" budget. These involve days dedicated to working on projects, as well as internal workshops and setting up a common core ranging from training to integrating new recruits.

Maintaining an entrepreneurial and pragmatic mindset

It is very important to keep your feet on the ground when it comes to innovation. We are fortunate to work on the front line of creation together with our customers while also developing our start-ups. This enables us to not only conduct technological exercises under real-life conditions but also to reflect on business models. The idea is to create new value that circulates, but it loses all its meaning if it has no profitability target or the public is not made aware of it.

Innovation is not only a new thought process: it is more of a dual exercise that spans technology and value enhancement.
Laurent Kratz, CEO

Nyuko has signed a partnership with Spuerkeess, in order to foster entrepreneurial spirit and strengthening the bank's position with company founders from the start of their businesses. More info in our article: https://www.spuerkeess.lu/en/blog/experts-corner/nyuko-fostering-entrepreneurial-spirit/. 

Entrepreneurship