Over the past two years, Accenture has developed a partnership with the Belgian non-profit Groupe One as part of our Corporate Citizenship Skills to Succeed initiative to equip people with the skills to find a job or start a business. This collaboration has resulted in a digital toolbox in the Cloud that entrepreneurs use to increase their financial management skills.
Groupe One’s specialty is coaching startups to develop sustainable businesses, mainly focusing on services and products such as ecological food production, urban agriculture, urban logistics, B2B and B2C services, waste management, and eco products. Although these entrepreneurs are experts in the activities they develop, they lack the necessary financial management skills to build viable businesses. To support them to develop these skills independently without being totally dependent on personal coaching, Groupe One designed ECOBOX, an easy-to-use digital tool that provides immediate visibility on all financial activities, including bookkeeping and invoicing and helps entrepreneurs anticipate eventual treasury problems. The potential of this tool attracted the attention of Accenture, and a pro bono team started work at Groupe One in 2015 to take ECOBOX to the next level.
Emmanuel d’Ieteren, co-director of Groupe One, and Kristien Van den Branden, Technology Senior Manager at Accenture, look back on how the partnership started and evolved.
Emmanuel: “In 2011, Groupe One decided to create an innovative tool to help entrepreneurs in their daily financial management. Year after year we explored this idea and different technical solutions until launching a platform called ECOBOX 1.0 in 2013. Accenture became very interested in this tool because it can really make a big difference to small businesses by providing the necessary skills to succeed in their venture. We realized that Accenture could help us in creating a 2.0 version of ECOBOX that matches Groupe One’s ambitious vision in terms of high performance, quality and security.”
Kristien: “The ECOBOX project was proposed to me at the beginning of 2015. I was very interested in this opportunity to bring my technology expertise to a pro bono project, which is very different to the projects I am used to. The partnership has also allowed Accenture to put our Digital 20/20 vision into practice in the context of sustainable entrepreneurship. We set up a pro bono team and together with Groupe One, looked at how we could improve the ECOBOX tool in the best way, both from a functional and technical perspective. We also thought about the best solution for a social organization to host the application so that it wouldn’t become a burden. This resulted in us rebuilding the tool on a Cloud platform.”
Emmanuel, what will 2016 bring? “We want this tool to be used by other supporting structures so that we can reach an even larger community. We are receiving support from the government to realize this ambition in one year but it remains a challenging objective. Accenture is supporting us to realize the scale-up. This includes strategic advice on how to have greater impact, with a clear roadmap and recommendations on how we should develop initiatives.”
Kristien, how would you describe your pro bono experience: “Participating in a pro bono project within our Skills to Succeed program is a unique experience. It makes you reconsider the ‘normal’ of big clients you work with every day. It challenges you to take a closer look at some key aspects of society that are not so visible in our day-to-day work. Through this experience I look differently at the typical struggles of small companies and I hope we have made a difference to a lot of entrepreneurs. There are also lessons learned from this experience that we can bring to our big clients that will help them to put a lot of things in perspective.”
Hans Verschoore, Managing Director at Accenture and sponsor of the partnership: “This kind of partnership proves that a non-profit like Groupe One and a large company like Accenture can define a common agenda that provides value for both. It is important to acknowledge the expertise of a local organization that is working every day with people who want to start a small business and finding solutions for concrete societal issues. Groupe One is having an impact on society, and Accenture people bring their skills and capabilities to accelerate this impact.”
Join us this thursday february 4
Get inspired by our social partners, their projects and how we collaborate for more social impact at Accenture’s 1st ‘Skills to Succeed’ event. (Accenture Brussels Office, Waterloolaan 16 Boulevard de Waterloo, 1000 Brussels)
About the program
Together with our strategic partners, Accenture will equip more than 3 million people with the skills to get a job or build a business by the end of fiscal 2020 through its Skills to Succeed initiative. As a part of this, the company will increase its focus on the successful transition of individuals from skill-building programs to sustainable jobs and businesses, and bring together more organizations across sectors to create large scale, lasting solutions aimed at closing global unemployment gaps. Since fiscal 2011, Accenture worldwide has equipped more than 1 million people with workplace and entrepreneurial skills. In Belgium and Luxemburg, we developed 10 strategic partnerships. In fiscal 2015 this resulted in 13 pro bono projects, 930 man days of Accenture consultancy, and 280 people involved in the Skills to Succeed initiatives impacting 10 000 beneficiaries.
