“Winning the Accenture Innovation Challenge in 2014 was the first step in our journey towards becoming succesful entrepreneurs” says Robin Dierckx, former Accenture employee in Belgium. Together with Maxime Van Steenberghe (another ex-Accenture colleague) and Thomas Vanesse, the trio has launched Creo², a social business aiming to make this world a better place through viable business models.
The Creo² movie is online. Watch it here.
What is Creo²?
Creo² offers shops and restaurants a tablet solution to increase their positive impact and to introduce responsible marketing and promotions. For example: “Spend €30=your favorite shop/restaurant offers you the opportunity to have a positive impact.”
How does it work?
On a smart tablet on the counter, customers can choose which NGO the shop or restaurant will support: offer a meal to someone in need, administer a vaccine or even plant a tree. For free. Accompanied with tools to help the business reduce its ecological footprint, the Creo² platform helps to reward responsible shops and restaurants for their planet-friendly actions.
What’s happened since winning the Accenture Innovation Challenge?
At first, we benefit from Accenture support and coaching to launch our company. We are among those who firmly believe that in the early days of a startup, it’s more important to secure sales than funding and to prove a demand exists for your product. So that’s what we did for more than one year: we quickly put a basic but viable product on the market, tested it with our first clients, improved it, established partnerships, had successes and failures, pivoted, changed clients, added partners and started all over again. Only when we were fully satisfied with our product, did we decide to launch a crowd-funding campaign with MyMicroinvest. This will allow us to conquer the Belgian market, and most importantly, to scale up our positive impact.
How is the crowd-funding campaign going?
Incredibly well! Our sell-first-invest-next strategy paid off. In a few days we reached our initial crowd-funding objectives with:
- More than 150k€ committed by the crowd and Business Angels
- A 100k€ loan from WING, an Investment Fund in digital startups
- Broad press coverage and interest in our product
Many small contributions make the difference!
There’s still time for you to join other investors and help us grow Creo². Visit us on MyMicroInvest.
You’re also part of the Accenture Family?
Do you know an Alumnus/a who has followed their dream and developed a personal project? We would love to hear their story! You can nominate them (or yourself) to be featured in our Alumni communications by contacting us directly.
