On Thursday 30 June 2015, the first edition of the Mind & Market Forum took place in the Maison du Savoir in Esch/Belval.
The initiative was developed in February 2015 by Deloitte Luxembourg; Luxinnovation; the National Research Fund (FNR); the University of Luxembourg; and Mind & Market in Belgium. The Forum gave around 35 young entrepreneurs the opportunity to pitch their business ideas to a panel of experienced business experts, with some of the entrepreneurs presenting these business ideas for the first time and others arriving with a complete business plan, a website and various prototypes. Representatives of the Forum stated that this variety and quality demonstrated in the projects exhibited the creativity and innovative mindset which is present in Luxembourg.
“The forum proved that there are many young entrepreneurs in Luxembourg and the Greater Region who have fresh ideas and are waiting for an opportunity to bring innovation to the market. The Mind & Market in Luxembourg initiative offers this opportunity,” explained Luc Brucher, Partner at Deloitte Luxembourg.
The projects were divided into four categories, these being big data & fintech; health & life sciences; industry service; and personal services. The potential investors and other market representatives present in the audience then challenged the entrepreneurs with questions on their business model, marketing strategy, team set-up, financial forecast and the potential benefits of the project.
Several prizes were awarded at the Mind & Market Forum. Its main prize went to Motion-S, which builds innovative telematics solutions for safer driving, and the Deloitte award went to the Perennity Book project, which focuses on web technology and specific services to enure the creation and delivery of unique, cross-generational messages. The HuMiX project received Luxinnovation and Technoport's prize, for their Human Microbiome on-a-chip, patent pending technology, whilst EuroDNS awarded its prize to the project Houser, a property search, comparison, and analytics website.
LuxPay, a mobile application that allows the user to digitalise their debit/credit cards and have a complete digital wallet, won the LuxFuturLab award; whilst Nyoko awarded its prize to the project Neveo, which uses a variety of communication channels to connect the elderly and their families. Alter Domus awarded its prize to the project Continuousphp, a PHP-centric PaaS to build, package, test and deploy applications in the same workflow, while the Wildgen award went to the project Braingineering Technologies, which is establishing a new method to generate three-dimensional organoids that resemble the human brain.
The Mind & Market Forum will be held annually in Luxembourg, to offer innovative project holders an opportunity to test their ideas on the market.
Photo by Deloitte (Luc Brucher, Partner at Deloitte Luxembourg)
