Orange and start-ups
Press kit
June 2016
Contents
p6
Identifying
p9
Supporting
p14
Promoting
Orange and start-ups
Press kit - June 2016
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Orange and start-ups
Press kit - June 2016
Introduction
The digital world has seen incredible acceleration in recent years.
Innovations are more in number, more visible and especially more quickly
accessible. As a major digital player in France and internationally, Orange
is aware of the potential of these transformations as a vehicle for human
progress and sustainable economic development.
That is why Orange is devoted to identifying, supporting and promoting
the digital talents that will change how its customers live what is
important to them tomorrow.
Orange carries out this mission chiefly in the fields
that will completely change how we communicate
(LoRa, 5G networks…), how we work, what we
do for entertainment, how we manage our daily
lives through the Internet of Things (connected
home, wellbeing and health) and FinTech (mobile
banking, crowdfunding), with the objective of:
n connecting Orange customers to what matters
to them,
n contributing to the development of the new
economy, making it a driver for local economic
growth and promoting new ways of thinking
about industry, agriculture, education,
environmental protection…
n taking advantage of the opportunities offered by
the new economy
Orange and start-ups
Orange is convinced that a collaborative approach
among the different innovation players – start-ups,
large groups, investors, developers, academics,
students, public authorities, NGOs and others –
will give rise to more creativity, more efficiency
and more of an economic impact. Orange leads
this mission by encouraging synergies between
players, by creating ecosystems for support and
exchange, and by disseminating knowledge in an
approach of open innovation and investment.
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Identifying
Identifying means, firstly, anticipating and identifying
the changes to come in digital uses, then selecting
and including the start-ups most likely to lead them
in Orange’s ecosystem.
The research and
innovation centres
As a large international group, Orange rallies experts from all walks
of life. Orange Gardens, the Group’s eco-campus for innovation, has
become the hub of a network of research and innovation centres linking
12 countries on 4 continents, from Silicon Valley to India, from innovation
centres in Africa to those of the Middle East. Each centre is integrated
into its own geographic ecosystem near local markets, and it works in
a network with all local players as well as in international bodies and
collaborative projects.
Their work concerns a wide range of fields, including mobile financial
services, content aggregation, mobile communication services, networks,
the Internet of Things and Big Data. Through cross-fertilisation, these
areas of expertise generate that intelligence which enriches and drives
digital innovation. Not only can they identify trends, but they also help
anticipate the changes in uses to come. This work contributes to the
selection of the start-ups.
Orange Digital Investment
Financing activities offer an opportunity to facilitate Orange’s monitoring and
anticipation of the services of the future which will enable its customers to
live what is important to them more fully. It is through this prism that the startups in which Orange will invest are identified.
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The Orange Fab accelerators
In 2013, in Silicon Valley, Orange’s international network of start-up accelerators was born: the Orange Fabs.
It now represents 12 organisations on 4 continents, and it has already accelerated or is in the process of
accelerating more than 180 young companies.
To select the network’s future start-ups, each Orange Fab location launches an average of two calls for
candidates per year to all start-ups that have already developed a product or service. After examining all of
the applications, some of them are selected to meet Orange and its partners during pitch sessions. At the end
of these sessions, a panel of judges chooses the two to seven start-ups that will join the local Orange Fab
programme.
To expand the start-ups’ horizons even further, Orange broadened the scope of a partnership with Deutsche
Telekom. Together, they have created the International Alliance alongside Singtel and Telefonica, giving start-ups
access to contracts with these partners, which represent a potential of more than one billion customers and
have complementary geographical footprints.
And in June 2015, Orange announced a partnership with KT Corp., the Republic of Korea’s largest operator,
and with the G-CEIC, a Korean governmental organisation managed by KT, in connection with their respective
start-up acceleration programmes. The start-ups selected by Orange, KT and the G-CEIC enjoy a range of
mechanisms to support them in their international development.
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The incubators in Africa
Orange opened incubators in five African countries: CTIC in Senegal, Ebene in Mauritius), Cipmen
in Niger, Createam in Mali and Saboutech in Guinea. Designed with inclusive, horizontal governance
uniting the public sector, the private sector and civil society, the originality of this model lies in this
co-creativity, designed to nurture the emergence and development of very small, small and medium
businesses and start-ups. This approach is also being deployed in other countries on the African
continent.
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Supporting
Supporting means enabling identified start-ups to develop
and establish themselves for the long term by making experts
available to them who provide human, material and financial
aid.
The Orange Fabs: men and women
to support the start-ups
The start-ups selected by the Orange Fabs are offered at least three months of support, both material (e.g.
availability of co-working spaces) and immaterial (e.g. mentoring, training, expert advice, etc.). In some
countries, they can even receive financial support of up to 15,000 euros. Orange’s goal is to build a working
relationship anchored in trust with the start-ups of the Orange Fabs in order to encourage the emergence of
win-win co-innovation projects.
Via Orange Developer, Orange opens
APIs to developers to stimulate the
creation of new services
Exposure to Orange’s APIs via developer.orange.
com encourages developer creativity and the
development of innovative services based on
Orange’s key solutions.
Orange has a catalogue of more than 20 selfservice application programme interfaces (API) in
three categories: APIs linked to the operator’s key
assets of identity, payment, communications and
the cloud; supplementary APIs about the Internet
of Things and proximity; and APIs devoted to the
development of services for Africa and the Middle
East.
Orange’s Cloud API allows developers to access
the personal cloud of Orange France customers –
subject to their consent – in order to read, enrich
and add content to it: photos, videos, documents,
etc.
Orange and start-ups
The SMS API launched in 2015 is offered to mobile
application publishers or web customers targeting
users in eight African and Middle Eastern countries:
Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Guinea, Niger,
Democratic Republic of the Congo and Senegal.
Orange also helps developers increase their
business in countries in which Orange is present
with personalised support. There, they may see the
visibility of their services increase.
In addition, Orange organises and participates in
challenges in order to play an active role in the
ecosystem, identify new uses of its services and
promote its APIs to the developer community.
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The Bonne
Nouvelle Villa
The Bonne Nouvelle Villa is a corpoworking
space and Orange’s living Human Relations (HR)
laboratory. Its objective: a better understanding
of how digital impacts our ways of working. Its
challenge: to identify and characterise trends
in methods of management and operations in
a digital environment, totally organised around
collaboration and exchange. In concrete terms,
several Orange project teams, start-ups and
freelancers are gathered together in 350 m2 of
office space in the heart of «Silicon Sentier».
The modular space can accommodate up to
60 people. Teams stay there for 9 months.
Together, they constitute a creative, caring
human community. The place is specially
organised to step back from the daily routine and
think about new collaborative practices in order
to disseminate them within Orange. With this
impetus, the digital evolution is a transformation
for the long term.
The partnership with
the Cité de l’Objet
Connecté in Angers
On June 12, 2015, President François Hollande
inaugurated the Cité de l’Objet Connecté in Angers.
A private company of which Orange is a shareholder
(along with Eolane and several other investors), the
Cité de l’Objet Connecté provides project leaders
with all the resources they need to successfully
manufacture their product in France. From design
(CAD) to prototyping (professional 3D printers,
electronic development stations) to industrialisation
(electronic component placement line, laser cutting,
micro-casting), everything can be done on site.
It’s a unique place for designing, prototyping,
industrialising and producing connected objects in
France.
In addition to its financial participation, Orange’s
support mainly involves in-kind assistance to startups in the form of products and services such as the
4G Starter Kit, MyPlug, U-by and, more generally,
Datavenue, provided free of charge during the project
incubation phase. Expertise and technology support
are also provided.
Orange Digital Investment:
financing in the plural
Created in 2016, this organisation leads the Group’s investments with the objective of either earning a
financial return or improving the products and services that Orange delivers to its customers through
synergies. Orange Digital Investment consolidates Orange’s start-up investment activities:
n The fund of funds activity includes all of Orange’s holdings in external funds which have their own
investment process; the most well-known of them is Iris Capital, founded with Publicis, for which an
additional grant of 75 million euros was announced at the end of last year.
The internal Orange Digital Ventures fund is the group’s investment vehicle. Created in 2015, it
has 100 million euros in funding. The investment themes of Orange Digital Ventures are linked to the
priorities of the Essentiels2020 strategic plan (New Connectivities, Internet of Things, FinTech, etc.). The
acquisition of holdings must not exceed 3 million euros and is subject to the Group’s approval.
n
The corporate digital development activity identifies opportunities and acquires or makes largescale strategic investments in digital operations that are not part of Orange’s core business but which
supplement the Orange promise, such as Deezer, DailyMotion and Africa Internet Group.
n
With more than 350 million euros under management, ODI is now one of the top five most dynamic
corporate venture funds in France.
The Group’s Senegalese subsidiary Sonatel also participates in the Teranga Capital fund, the leading
venture capital fund in Senegal. Teranga Capital’s goal is to bring an innovative solution to meeting
the financing needs of small and medium businesses in the range of 75,000 to 300,000 euros. Teranga
Capital was created and began operating in March 2016.
Orange is a
member of 10
competitiveness
clusters in France
These clusters were created to encourage
local synergies for innovative projects. Most
notably, Orange chairs the “Images and
Networks” cluster. The clusters enable it to be
a development actor for more than 3,000 digital
start-ups and SMEs.
The Technology
Research Institutes
As part of the French government’s Investments
for the Future Programme, the Group is involved in
two Technology Research Institutes (IRT). Orange
chairs the b<>com IRT, which is working on ultrabroadband fixed and mobile networks and the
content of the future, in particular with 20 SMEs.
It also contributes to the SystemX Institute, whose
work concerns digital systems engineering.
The incubators and Digital spin-offs
the Entrepreneur
Club site
In February 2016, Orange launched a new
space for information in French and English on
entrepreneurs in Africa and the Middle East.
The website not only informs the entrepreneurs,
it puts them in touch with a variety of Orange
programmes supporting entrepreneurship.
The Entrepreneur Club also offers practical
information and tools for business creation.
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Orange and start-ups
Orange has set up a plan to “become a digital
entrepreneur” which allows entrepreneurial
employees to use innovation projects made available
to them, to compare their project and choices to
market realities, to develop a prototype during an
incubation period, and to get support from business
experts.
This employee-oriented process of innovation also
contributes to an ecosystem of innovative businesses
which create value and are close to and potentially
partners of Orange. Over the 2014-2015 period, 23
start-ups nourished by this process were created.
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Promoting
Promoting means offering start-ups preferred access to
procurement contracts, but also making them more visible
to their target publics on the international scene.
The Alliance and Orange Fab networks
The Group’s footprint in 28 countries gives start-ups in the Orange Fab network the ability to take
advantage of a powerful accelerator for their international development. We offer them the possibility
of participating in major internal events at which the start-ups pitch to a number of Country directors,
Marketing directors and others, giving them faster access to certain contracts and assistance that can
go as far as including their solution in Orange’s offers and services. This type of opportunity is part of our
50% transformation objective for the Orange Fabs in countries in which we are operators.
Start-ups of the Orange Fab network can benefit from the hosting capabilities of foreign start-ups in
countries in which they wish to examine market opportunities, develop business, and network with local
internal and external business partners.
These are incredible opportunities for start-ups to exploit the resources and know-how of major
international players and benefit from powerful acceleration of their international development.
Hello Startup
This is a weekly show for start-ups on BFM TV and BFM Business in France which helps them become
better known to customers, partners and investors.
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The Orange
Entrepreneur
Award
Every year since 2011, the Orange Social
Entrepreneur in Africa Award recognises
entrepreneurs which offer products or services that
make innovative use of ICTs to meet the needs of
the people of Africa in a variety of fields, including
health, agriculture, education, energy, industry
and commerce. The three award-winners receive
financial aid and support from experts for six
months. A patent is registered in the winner’s name
in his or her country. Fifteen winners have already
received grants and support that have helped them
grow their business, including Tele-irrigation in
Niger, Chifco in Tunisia, PassDocteur in Senegal,
Station Energie in Côte d’Ivoire, Bassita in Egypt,
UpOwa in Cameroon and MyAgro in Mali.
For more information:
French Tech
#FrenchTech promotes a national and regional
public initiative serving the ecosystem of French
technology start-ups, with the goal of making France
one of the great start-up nations and of fostering the
development of jobs and economic value in France.
Orange affirms its support to the French Tech
initiative as an actor in the digital ecosystems of 13
large cities and regions with the French Tech label
(Rennes, Brest, Nantes, Lille, Normandy, Lorraine,
Paris, Lyon, Nice, Aix-Marseille, Montpellier,
Toulouse and Bordeaux), 4 French Tech thematic
territories (Avignon, Saint Etienne, Alsace and
Angers) and the Loire Valley French Tech.
Orange trains the spotlight on French start-ups
operating in the field of connected objects, brought
together under one name: French Tech connected
objects. In October 2015, Orange signed a charter
to showcase these connected objects in its points
of sale. After a first edition in October 2015, Orange
renewed its support for the “Connected Objects
Week” initiative in 2016, held from May 16th to 22nd.
entrepreneurclub.orange.com
#EClubOrange
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Orange, start-up’s partner
Identifying
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Promoting
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Notes
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press contact – +33 1 44 44 93 93
Olivier Emberger, [email protected]