Entrepreneurial Leaders:

5 min readFeb 9, 2021

Who are the individuals we love to innovate with, and what makes our collaborations work?

For over 6 years now, Souffl has been creating new businesses, products, and services and helping to design significant innovations. This endeavor, along with our reflections on how to promote successful innovation, has led us to where we are today. 2021 presents the opportunity for Souffl — through a series of articles — to share our experience, revisit our approach to innovation, and understand why some innovation projects succeed while others fail. For the first installment, we are going to paint a picture of the ideal partner we call the entrepreneurial leader and how we can work together.

It may well be that the winning formula consists of a subtle blend of engagement, shared interests, and a capacity for openness on an intellectual and cultural level. Through their unique outlook, these project leaders have found, with our support, the resources to create or reinvent the future of their businesses.

An entrepreneurial leader is an entrepreneur, first and foremost.

In this regard, they are clever and know how to invest their time and energy by staying focused and methodical. They make progress by completing each step before moving on to the next one; they identify an opportunity, confirm the corresponding need, devise and verify the solution, test its traction, verify the business model, and proceed with the full-scale version.

As entrepreneurs, they accept the possibility of failure as a rule of the game, and this in no way hinders their aspirations. They consider it an opportunity to learn lessons for future projects. Among our clients, in 2015, the senior management of Manutan (@Pierre Olivier Brial) and its innovation division (@Martin Sauer) laid down ground rules for leading innovation projects, in which they included the right to fail, as long as lessons can be drawn for use in future projects.

But being an entrepreneur also means having the capacity to envision places you can venture beyond the existing market and products.

Entrepreneurs see the shifting market and know that their company’s culture needs to adapt to it. Human behavior, society, and environments can change rapidly, and it isn’t easy to grasp all that complexity and the changes to come while remaining focused on your business as it is now.

One of the strengths of this entrepreneur is knowing they need support to identify key insights on which to build a strong, original vision.

You can innovate on anything, but not with anyone:

We believe that to innovate, you have to initiate a project without any assumptions or preconceived ideas.

We always start by gaining perspective to paint a big picture of all the actors, their interactions, and the forces and challenges influencing the issue we are interested in.

The second step is to go into the field to observe, analyze, and experience what the future customers are experiencing. At this point, we look at how we can not only satisfy these expectations, but also exceed them. What matters is to be curious, to want to learn, listen, understand the complexity, and then analyze the information gathered.

For this to work, our partners must have the same mindset. The knowledge shared with the end client is the path to develop a stronger vision involving project teams, to be faster at each stage, to be more precise in defining the product’s key features and more demanding in the design of the full solution.

In other words, you can innovate on anything, but not with anyone.

We work with bold leaders who see that, during the innovation process, the common performance indicators and their trend charts will be useless when it comes to driving innovation in its early phases. At this stage, they do not need management tools — they need navigational tools.

Contrary to what you might expect, the most innovative projects do not typically start with a technological invention; they are created in the field. They are the work of daring visionaries who, out of a desire to understand the needs and expectations of their future customers, have the foresight to have their ideas judged by these end users.

The most notable example is our foray into the field of horseback riding, carried out in close cooperation with the team at Paris-Turf (@Hugues Quilain, @Anh-Taï Luu, @Francois Reeves). During the exploratory and design phases, we all went to meet horse trainers, owners, veterinarians, and scientists from CIRALE. All of these meetings and immersive experiences were instrumental to the project’s success.

Learn more about Exalt Training: Inventing a New Business

Entrepreneurial leaders are independent; they spend more time engaging with their end clients, testing and verifying, than they do in their offices. As Steve Blank says, they “get out of the building”. It’s their main playing field and their way of identifying key insights from which to build a strong, original vision.

For example, when we work in the healthcare sector, we try to understand the problem at hand by fully immersing ourselves in the real-life experience of it all. Instead of reading health records, we observe: where the patient lives, how they organize their day, what their habits are, and what tools help them. We also try to understand specific moments of their life and what causes them, to rationally explore all the facets of their experience.

Entrepreneurial leaders are pragmatic, too; they know that as the end goal of a project is always to generate value, an innovation must start by confirming actual, significant needs. If no such needs exist, the project is pointless and should probably be shelved.

In other words, their relationship to the company is closer to an investor-entrepreneur relationship than a typical hierarchy. Sure, they are accountable to management, but more in the way a startup is accountable to an investor. This model, focused on innovation, frees them as much as possible from their other prerogatives and allows them to decide on and shift their work in a very agile way.

Conclusion:

Ultimately, once all the conditions for innovation are met, what makes a real difference is the degree of closeness achieved with the company and the partnering entrepreneurs, in the sense that we can talk about real issues.

Then and only then can you go beyond the need, beneath the surface-level experience, and make it truly wonderful. That’s where an element of creativity is expressed.

We can talk about closeness, because through our work, we participate in deeply transforming businesses. While not all decision makers are well prepared for this at first, each new project undertaken with us will strengthen their own beliefs and convictions.

We are proud of this approach and of our uniqueness.

This article drew on conversations between Souffl cofounders Nicolas Baumgartner, Arnaud Carrette, Fabien Fumeron, and Bernard Simoni, a profiler and analyst with Souffl.

About souffl:

Souffl, a design and innovation studio, works with those striving to foster innovation, and invent and transform habits and business.