When thinking out of the box is not enough…

Imagine an evening at the UK National Space Centre in Leicester, filled with brilliant speakers, thought-provoking video and mind-blowing conversation about “One Step Beyond” satellite science and technology.

That was the exact purpose of the TEDx event organized by the TEDx Leicester franchise back in November 2017.

Together with Dr Emily Shuckburgh - Deputy Head of Polar Oceans team andBritish Antarctic Survey, and Dr Samantha Lavender - Managing Director ofPixalytics, we had the opportunity to share our experience and inspire an attendance at close to 200, 70% made up of 16–18 youth, with a majority of female, and all interested in STEM and all things space related.

From left to right: Dr Emily Shuckburgh, Dr Samantha Lavender and Corentin Guillo

As explained in a previous blog post, which you can find here, preparing a great talk is not an easy task, delivering it is even harder.

The three key lessons I would retain from this experience are:

• You need to tell a compelling story in a relatively short time.
• It needs to be supported, but not distracted, by great visuals.
• You need to engage with the audience so they remain captivated from the beginning to the end.

I don’t know if I’ve nailed it down, but I should say that the feedback I have received afterward were quite overwhelming and really made the efforts worthwhile. At the end, I did it because I wanted to inspire a new generation to stop “thinking out of the box” and getting out of the office to become a space entrepreneur.

It is now with great pleasure that I am sharing with you the TEDx talk which is build up in three parts:

Part 1 (video link)

First I explain why the space sector is a great place to start a new venture now, looking at technology trends such as New Space which are providing some serious big data from space, Cloud Solutions which are commoditized and offered as a service or Artificial Intelligence technologies which have been open sourced.

I am using the examples of Planet, a satellite operator which is exploiting large constellation of micro satellites to offer a daily revisit of our planet; Descartes Labs who has leveraged the Google Cloud to build a big data refinery to understand our planet; or the Facebook Core Data Science, Infrastructure, and Artificial Intelligence teams who gained a deeper understanding of the distribution of population by applying machine learning techniques to high-resolution satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe.

Part 2 (video link)

Then, I talked a bit more about what it takes to create a new venture, emphasizing what I learn at the MIT Entrepreneurship Development Programme with Bill Aulet.

I explain how it is important to assemble a great Team to build up a new venture but also that sometimes you have to know when it is a good time to let go some members as they are not contributing anymore to it but jeopardising its progress. I challenge the importance of a business Idea but talk about the identification of a customer pain which can be addressed, repeated and scaled up to create or tap into a Market. But here again, I share my experience on the difficulties to select a beachhead market, which should not too niche and limit the scale up opportunities, or not too large so it is not too hard to penetrate.

Part 3 (video Link)

Finally, in the last part of the talk, I explain that the three previous points do not count for more than half of a successful venture, but the most important is really about the execution. But unfortunately there is no real sources of information that can tell you when and how you have to execute.

So I just use my own experience, sharing some personal stories illustrating when I feel I had to make important decisions. One of the most important being the day I decided to stop waiting for others to execute on my vision because they liked how I was thinking out of the box, but decided to make it myself.

Isn’t it the definition of entrepreneurship in fact, when you stop waiting for others and decide to make things happening yourself?

If you’ve got 15 minutes of your time to spare, watch the entire TEDx talk and let me know your thoughts and when you feel you had to execute as well.