BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

Background

NUMA, which started as the Silicon Sentier association, has constantly evolved over its lifetime. Silicon Sentier, named after the Sentier neighborhood of Paris' 2nd arrondissement, was launched in 2000 with subsidies from the city of Paris and the surrounding region and with private donations from interested corporations. The association started transforming the existing garment district into a tech hub by renovating an old factory building and turning it into one of the first coworking spaces in Europe. NUMA grew from a coworking space with a living lab into a full-service creative community space. It added services and offerings when there was grassroots demand and then discontinued them when they were no longer needed or there were sufficient offe- rings from third parties. NUMA has expanded to seven cities around the world (Barcelona, Bengaluru, Berlin, Casablanca, Mexico City, Moscow, and New York). NUMA is an example of the organic development of a CCS together with its community/ecosystem, which later moved beyond its natural ecosystem in Paris.

In Essence

NUMA promotes the idea that start-ups, corporate teams, small and medium enterprises, communities, and public institutions can grow together and become mutually beneficial. NUMA offers assistance in organizing conferences, roundtables, hackathons, and barcamps (open, participatory workshop events, primarily focused on technology, where the content is provided by the participants). It also stages two- to five-day workshops to help entrepreneurs learn about new working methods inspired by lean start-up, user-focused design, and design thinking to develop new services or improve existing ones through user research, rapid prototyping, and testing. NUMA also provides a range of unique corporation-facing innovation services. Its "intrapreneur" support program stretches over several months to accelerate the development of new products. Currently, more than half of NUMA's budget is paid for by private sponsors, with the rest covered by revenue from projects and innovation programs offered to corporations, events management, and a 5 percent equity in each start-up accelerated.

Impact

In Paris, NUMA functions as a general space: It provides an array of services for entrepreneurs, start-ups, and corporations and is open to participants from any industry. The space is characterized by its evident success in building entrepreneurial communities. NUMA pioneered many of the innovation services available in Europe and now has expanded to offering activities for big corporations. Being a catalyzer of a tech urban ecosystem, NUMA has also influenced urban regeneration in Paris by transforming the declining garment district into the city's tech center. Created by entrepreneurs in 2000 as a digital cluster, NUMA (then the Silicon Sentier association) jump-started the "digitalization" of the neighborhood by vocalizing and promoting the space's activities. By 2008, the space was actively building a wider community around it and opened the community space La Cantine; three years later, NUMA began experimenting with new business models by launching one of the first start-up accelerators. In 2013, NUMA changed location, moving its newly formed lab closer to the city center, but the impact the space has had on the Sentier neighborhood is lasting: The neighborhood, full of start-ups, VCs, and corporate tech labs, is already functioning as an independent urban tech ecosystem.

In Practice

Project in Focus

NUMA offers its visitors access to the Open Innovation Studio, where companies have the opportunity to work with NUMA's entrepreneurs to identify new business opportunities and create a start-up to test innovative products or services. Assisted by a product owner, a dream team of entrepreneurs (business, technical, and design) will develop and test the solution until a product/market fit is found. Corporate teams are offered the same benefits as start-ups accelerated by NUMA: workspaces, meeting experts, mentoring, and method coaching sessions. NUMA's team suggests that by departing from the usual working environment and thinking outside of the box, teams work together more effectively on a new product launch.