“The forum proved that there are many young entrepreneurs in Luxembourg and the Greater Region who have fresh ideas and are waiting for an opportunity to bring innovation to the market. The Mind & Market in Luxembourg initiative offers this opportunity,” explains Luc Brucher, Partner at Deloitte Luxembourg.   

Creativity let loose
The projects were divided into four categories: big data & fintech, health & life sciences, industry services, and personal services. Some of the young entrepreneurs presented their business ideas for the first time. Others came to the forum with a complete business plan, a website and various prototypes. They all shared their contagious enthusiasm and determination, and the desire to receive advice from experienced entrepreneurs and market representatives to adapt their ambitious ideas to the market reality.

The potential investors and other market representatives challenged the entrepreneurs by questioning their business model, the team set-up, the marketing strategy, or the financial forecast. “What is the problem you are trying to solve? How will you make my life easier?”
Some were heard saying “We invest in you, not in your slides.” The forum saw several entrepreneurs reach their eureka moment thanks to these comments, questions and simple, but sound, business advice.

The winners
Motion-S, which builds innovative telematics solutions for safer driving, won the main prize at the Mind & Market Forum. The Deloitte award went to the project Perennity Book, a start-up focused on web technology and specific services to ensure the creation and delivery of unique, personal messages, travelling across generations. Luxinnovation and Technoport awarded their prize to the project HuMiX, which has developed a disruptive patent pending technology - a Human Microbiome on-a-chip, while EuroDNS awarded its prize to the project Houser, a property search, comparison, and analytics website.

The LuxFuturLab award went to the project LuxPay, a mobile application that allows the user to digitalize their debit/credit cards and have a complete digital wallet, while Nyoko awarded its prize to the project Neveo, which connects the elderly and their families through the combination of various types of communication channels. Alter Domus awarded its prize to the project Continuousphp, a PHP-centric PaaS to build, package, test and deploy applications in the same workflow, while the Wildgen award went to the project Braingineering Technologies, which is establishing a new method to generate three-dimensional organoids that resemble the human brain.

Linking minds and markets
Mind & Market in Luxembourg is an initiative that aims to support young entrepreneurs by creating the link between start-ups and experienced market players for the mutual benefit of both. The initiative was established by Deloitte Luxembourg, Luxinnovation, the National Research Fund (FNR), the University of Luxembourg, and Mind & Market in Belgium in February this year.

Mind & Market in Luxembourg will organize an annual forum and regular meetings to guide innovative project holders and offer them an opportunity to test their ideas on the market. Its online platform www.mindandmarket.lu aims at facilitating the transformation of innovative projects into business applications.