iminds insights - flipped knowledge transfer model

TECH UPDATES BASED ON INTERVIEWS WITH ACADEMIC AND INDUSTRY EXPERTS - WWW.IMINDS.BE/INSIGHTS

AS A STARTUP, YOU CAN’T JUST WALK INTO A UNIVERSITY AND COMMISSION RESEARCH, BUT IMINDS GIVES YOU THE HEFT TO GET THAT DONE.

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Zhong Xu, Lightspeed Restaurant Director of Hospitality Product

FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE

TRANSFERGiving digital startups access to vital research capacity

04 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

06 GIVING DIGITAL STARTUPS ACCESS TO VITAL RESEARCH CAPACITY

14 SERVING UP THE CLOUD TO RESTAURANTS AROUND THE WORLDZhong Xu, Lightspeed Restaurant Director of Hospitality Product

18 FINDING MARKET OPPORTUNITY THE ‘FLIPPED’ WAYBart Van der Roost,CEO neoScores

22 PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT FASTERHans Constandt,Ontoforce

GIVING DIGITAL STARTUPS ACCESS TO VITAL RESEARCH CAPACITY

Research capacity is one of the biggest gaps separating startups from the marketplace — the knowledge and means to turn innovative ideas into customer-ready solutions.

While larger companies are often plugged into the research community or have their own in-house research and development teams, a startup’s innovation efforts are usually driven by small teams of developers and creatives, often operating without a precisely defined roadmap. In essence, startups lack the “R” part of the R&D equation.

iMinds’ Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model gives these companies access to the academic research capacity of Flanders’ five universities in a way that’s tailored specifically to their needs and dynamics. Agile and incremental, this approach gives startups the freedom to ‘fail fast’ and change direction quickly — yielding tangible results that can be applied directly to solution development.

REVERSING THE KNOWLEDGE FLOW

The Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model reverses the researcher-driven flow of traditional academic research. Instead, discovery is motivated directly by the business and technical innovation challenges brought forward by digital entrepreneurs.

While conventional contract research also reverses the knowledge transfer flow in this way, the Flipped model is different because it focuses specifically on meeting the needs of startup companies. It is also highly collaborative: researchers and entrepreneurs form a team, working together to define research questions, write research proposals and co-create knowledge.

Finally, the Flipped model helps solve other challenges faced by startups in the early stages of development, such as obtaining access to financing. Without being able to demonstrate the capacity to follow through on research requirements, startups risk losing out on vital financial support from funding bodies.

THE NIGHT BEFORE IMINDS

THE CONFERENCE, I GOT AN E-MAIL FROM

IMINDS. LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, WE CONFIRMED A PARTNERSHIP FOR IMPLEMENTING AN

ADAPTIVE LEARNING ALGORITHM FOR

APP NINJAS.

“

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Freek van de Griendt, Founder & Managing Director App Ninjas

04 | iMinds insights

THE FLIPPED MODEL APPLIED

The Flipped model was born out of iMinds’ collaboration with Flemish startup Ontoforce, which in 2011 was seeking to solve a specific technical problem associated with its semantic web search solution. iMinds connected the company to its Multimedia Lab (MMLab) research group at Ghent University, which developed the solution Ontoforce needed. The company then bought the intellectual property and struck an ongoing R&D arrangement with MMLab.

More recently, iMinds has supported a wide range of startups, including App Ninjas and POSIOS. In the case of App Ninjas, iMinds connected the company with its ITEC research group at KU Leuven to advance the customization engine of its e-learning platform. For POSIOS, iMinds helped devise a test methodology to ensure its cloud-based point-of-sale platform would meet the real-time demands of the restaurant industry. While working with iMinds, POSIOS grew from a team of three to a global business with 23 employees and more than 700 customers — thereby becoming part of international hospitality solution provider Lightspeed.

THE WAY FORWARD

By connecting entrepreneurs to the research capacity they require and orienting the research process around solving specific challenges associated with targeted R&D, iMinds’ Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model stands to boost the economic performance of startup companies, forge new bonds between academia and industry, and help governments achieve their objectives for commercialized innovation.

iMinds is one of a very few incubators that has built-in research capacity. Since its inception, iMinds has supported more than 80 startup projects through its iStart incubation program. In 2011, the program was opened up to external entrepreneurs; currently, more than half of the iStart incubation projects come from outside iMinds or academia.

iMinds extends an open invitation to all entrepreneurs and researchers to connect with its team and discuss opportunities to further test and deploy the Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

about iMinds’ collaboration between startups and researchers, please contact Sven De [email protected]

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

iMinds insights | 05

IMINDS’ FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER MODEL LEVELS THE PLAYING FIELD AND GETS INNOVATIONS TO MARKET

Research capacity is one of the biggest gaps between startups and the marketplace — the knowledge and means to turn innovative ideas into customer-ready solutions.

While larger companies are often plugged into the research community or have their own in-house research and development teams, startups’ innovation efforts are usually driven by small teams of developers and creatives, often operating without a precisely defined roadmap. In essence, startups lack the “R” part of the R&D equation.

Public research organizations like iMinds typically exist to advance their countries’ innovation agendas by

making research capacity available to industry, but they tend to require companies to at least know what kind of knowledge they need. Yet startups, which typically operate in ‘exploration mode’, don’t often bring forward perfectly formulated research hypotheses. In many cases, finding the question is a key step in their process.

iMinds’ Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model meets startups where they’re at. It gives them access to the academic research capacity of Flanders’ five universities through an approach tailored to their size, needs and dynamics. Agile and incremental, the Flipped model gives startups the freedom to innovate — to fail fast and change direction quickly — yielding tangible results that can be applied directly to solution development.


WHY STARTUPS MATTER

Small- and medium-sized companies are major engines of economic development, responsible for about half of all jobs and more than 90 percent of business in many regions. Despite that vital role, these companies — especially startups — struggle to make use of the research capacity they need to realize their full potential.


The Flipped model also helps solve other challenges faced by startups in the early stages of development, such as obtaining access to financing. Without being able to demonstrate the capacity to follow through on research requirements, startups risk losing out on vital financial support from funding bodies. As several iMinds-supported startups have found, having an experienced, credible research partner - with financial means - on board can make the difference.

WHAT’S BEING FLIPPED?

Flipped Knowledge Transfer reverses the researcher-driven flow of traditional academic research, so that discovery is instead motivated directly by the business and technical innovation challenges brought forward by digital entrepreneurs.

While conventional contract research also reverses the knowledge transfer flow in this way, the Flipped model is different because it focuses specifically on meeting the needs of startup companies.

CONTRACT RESEARCH THE FLIPPED MODEL

Because part of their challenge is defining, in a fundamental way, what research questions need answering in order for innovation goals to be achieved, startups have a unique need to approach knowledge creation collaboratively rather than as a one-sided venture.

This is precisely the focus of the Flipped model: researchers and entrepreneurs form a team, working together to define research questions, write research proposals and >>

THE FLIPPED MODEL

Designed specifically for startups, the Flipped model helps bridge the cultural divide between entrepreneurs and researchers, facilitating greater collaboration as the research problem is identified, (re)defined and solved. It may also take a more entrepreneurial approach to research funding, based on the principles of risk and reward.

CONTRACT RESEARCH

With traditional contract research, companies pay research organizations to generate the answers to specific, well-defined questions. Few startups have the deep pockets required for this type of engagement.

VS


co-create knowledge. This degree of collaboration marks a change in traditional research relationships in that it requires researchers to become more entrepreneurially minded and for innovation to be applied to the funding process.

iMinds’ collaboration with Ontoforce is a good illustration of this kind of collaboration. Founded in Flanders, Ontoforce came to iMinds for help strengthening its business plans and also to solve a specific technical problem associated with its semantic web search solution. iMinds connected the company to researchers in its Multimedia Lab (MMLab) at Ghent University.

MMLab developed the solution Ontoforce needed; the company

bought it, built it into its product and struck an ongoing R&D arrangement with MMLab. Rather than receive traditional research funding, MMLab recouped its investment of time and effort through the sale of intellectual property (IP) to Ontoforce. In other words, MMLab took the risk and reaped the reward.

BRIDGING THE CULTURE GAP

Working closely together may not always be perfectly intuitive or comfortable for startups and researchers at first. After all, the business and research cultures are inherently different. In business, the old saying that “time is money” is truer than ever before; getting to results as quickly and efficiently as

possible is always a prime objective. In research, on the other hand, exploration has enormous value and is vital to the process of true discovery; thoroughness trumps haste due to the unforgiving rigor of peer review.

THE FLIPPED MODEL APPLIED

iMinds defined the Flipped model through the experience of working with Ontoforce. Since then, it has applied it to a number of startups — in some cases proactively identifying opportunities to connect startups to the research capacity they require.

That was the story with Flemish startup App Ninjas.

OCT 2011

MAY 2012

DEC 2012

APR 2013

FALL 2013

JAN 2014

NOV 2011

THE ONTOFORCE EXPERIENCE: A TIMELINE

Ontoforce approaches iMinds with the idea for a semantic web search solution.

iMinds realizes Ontoforce needs to better define its business plan and solution and connects the company to research capacity within MMLab.

With MMLab’s research capacity on board, Ontoforce receives SOFI (Spin-O� Financing Instrument) funding.

Ontoforce proposes a two-year ICON project to further develop its solution. The proposal is not approved, but leads to a bilateral R&D project with iMinds-MMLab-University of Ghent.

Ontoforce negotiates deal for IP generated by MMLab — plus future technology development.

Ontoforce and MMLab enter into collabora-tion with Harvard University through the eagle-i program.

Ontoforce secures additional SOFI funding and venture capital from LRM.

FLIP! FLIP! FLIP! FLIP!



OCT 2011

MAY 2012

DEC 2012

APR 2013

FALL 2013

JAN 2014

NOV 2011

THE ONTOFORCE EXPERIENCE: A TIMELINE

Ontoforce approaches iMinds with the idea for a semantic web search solution.

iMinds realizes Ontoforce needs to better define its business plan and solution and connects the company to research capacity within MMLab.

With MMLab’s research capacity on board, Ontoforce receives SOFI (Spin-O� Financing Instrument) funding.

Ontoforce proposes a two-year ICON project to further develop its solution. The proposal is not approved, but leads to a bilateral R&D project with iMinds-MMLab-University of Ghent.

Ontoforce negotiates deal for IP generated by MMLab — plus future technology development.

Ontoforce and MMLab enter into collabora-tion with Harvard University through the eagle-i program.

Ontoforce secures additional SOFI funding and venture capital from LRM.

FLIP! FLIP! FLIP! FLIP!

In September 2014, the company was looking to develop a customizable platform to help organizations onboard new employees and migrate users to Google apps. It mentioned its interest in e-learning technologies on its registration form for iMinds The Conference. That caught the attention of iMinds staff, who put App Ninjas in touch with ITEC, an iMinds research group at KU Leuven. The research team was excited by the prospect of helping App Ninjas develop the ‘recommendation engine’ for its platform, a mechanism for automatically adapting learning to account for users’ prior knowledge and experience.

“The night before iMinds The Conference, I got an e-mail from ITEC, which has specialization in

technology-enhanced learning,” says Freek van de Griendt, Founder of App Ninjas. “Less than a month later, we confirmed a partnership for implementing an adaptive learning algorithm for App Ninjas. That’s how connections originate at iMinds.”

Through the fall, iMinds and App Ninjas hammered out a working arrangement, business plan and proposal for SOFI (Spin-Off Financing Instrument) funding. That proposal was approved in January 2015. Without access to ITEC’s research capacity, App Ninjas would not have received the funding to advance its product development. Since then, App Ninjas and ITEC have embarked on their first research project to develop the recommendation engine technology. >>


WITHIN A YEAR OF CONTACTING US, ONTOFORCE HAD LICENSED A PIECE OF IMINDS’ MMLAB INTELLECTUAL

PROPERTY; WE SUCCESSFULLY APPLIED FOR AN INNOVATION GRANT; ONTOFORCE

GAVE US NEW REQUIREMENTS AND CHALLENGES; AND WE BUILT A TESTBED

TO FURTHER FINE-TUNE AND EXPAND OUR TECHNOLOGY. ON TOP OF THAT, I’VE BEEN PART OF ONTOFORCE’S ADVISORY

BOARD EVER SINCE AND TOGETHER WE’VE MANAGED TO GET A DEAL WITH

HARVARD UNIVERSITY. A CLEAR WIN-WIN FOR BOTH PARTIES!

Erik Mannens, ResearcheriMinds - MMLab - Ghent University


One of the most compelling examples of the effectiveness of the Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model is a Flemish company that started out as POSIOS and now goes by the name Lightspeed Restaurant. In the space of two years, the startup grew from a founding team of three to a global business with 23 employees and more than 700 customers.

POSIOS came to iMinds not only for incubation support but also to devise a test methodology for ensuring its cloud-based point-of-sale platform for restaurants would deliver the real-time performance demanded by the hospitality industry, which

it lacked the R&D capacity to do in house. iMinds helped POSIOS develop that test methodology, which by the end of 2014 was yielding its first data for analysis.

“We did not have the capability to devise that kind of framework ourselves,” says Zhong Xu, Director of Hospitality Product for Lightspeed Restaurant. “So we asked iMinds and they helped us work out a technical test with one of their research groups in Ghent.”

iMinds’ support contributed to the success and ultimate acquisition of POSIOS in 2014 by global hospitality

iMinds is exceptional in that it is one of a very few incubators that has built-in research capacity (or a research center with built-in incubation capacity, if you want). Since 2011, iMinds has supported more than 80 startup projects through its iStart incubation program. Since the program was opened up to external entrepreneurs, more than half of the incubation projects come from outside iMinds or academia.

iMINDS START-UP SUPPORT Entrepreneurs can enter at any stage

Internationalization & scalingIdeation / Initial development Incubation User & technical testing

Go GlobalOpportunity Recognition Workshops

iStart Technical Testing Center

Follow-up financingEntrepreneur-in-residenceiBoot Living Lab

FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

IMINDS MATCHES ENTREPRENEURS WITH RESEARCHERS

The Flemish government created iMinds in 2004 to develop digital solutions through demand-driven research, and to foster commercial and societal uptake of new technologies, knowledge, products and services. Today, iMinds acts as an ‘integrator’ of digital research, leveraging strategic partnerships with all five universities in Flanders (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Ghent University, Hasselt University, KU Leuven and University of Antwerp).

This graphic illustrates iMinds’ multi-stage entrepreneurial support process, highlighting the various stages at which companies can engage with iMinds.

ENTREPRENEURS MATCHED

WITH IMINDS RESEARCHERS

STARTUPS COMING FROM ACADEMIA

>>



solution provider Lightspeed — at which point the Flemish startup became Lightspeed Restaurant. Its story shows the speed at which the Flipped model can deliver market results — and offers an indication of why a growing number of companies involved with iMinds are engaging in ongoing collaboration with research groups.

THE WAY FORWARD

Startups have a crucial role to play in economic development, diversification and growth. Their historical isolation from centers of research has put them — and society as a result — at a disadvantage.

By connecting startups to the research capacity they require and orienting the research process around solving specific challenges associated with targeted R&D, the Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model stands to boost the economic performance of startup companies, forge new bonds between academia and industry, and help governments achieve their objectives for commercialized innovation.



iMINDS START-UP SUPPORT Entrepreneurs can enter at any stage

Internationalization & scalingIdeation / Initial development Incubation User & technical testing

Go GlobalOpportunity Recognition Workshops

iStart Technical Testing Center

Follow-up financingEntrepreneur-in-residenceiBoot Living Lab

FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

IMINDS MATCHES ENTREPRENEURS WITH RESEARCHERS

The Flemish government created iMinds in 2004 to develop digital solutions through demand-driven research, and to foster commercial and societal uptake of new technologies, knowledge, products and services. Today, iMinds acts as an ‘integrator’ of digital research, leveraging strategic partnerships with all five universities in Flanders (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Ghent University, Hasselt University, KU Leuven and University of Antwerp).

This graphic illustrates iMinds’ multi-stage entrepreneurial support process, highlighting the various stages at which companies can engage with iMinds.

ENTREPRENEURS MATCHED

WITH IMINDS RESEARCHERS

STARTUPS COMING FROM ACADEMIA


When startups are better equipped for IP creation — through the Flipped model, for instance — they have the potential to be more appealing to investors. And when researchers have the opportunity to work so closely and collaboratively with entrepreneurs, they gain invaluable industry experience, which is highly relevant considering that 80 percent of researchers end up pursuing careers outside of academia.

While iMinds’ focus to date has been on applying the Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model to startup companies, the organization believes it could easily be adapted to support small- and medium-sized enterprises more broadly. Nor is the Flipped model only relevant in the Flemish context; public research organizations in virtually any jurisdiction should be able to reap observable benefits from reversing the knowledge transfer flow and fostering greater

collaboration between entrepreneurs and researchers.

Going forward, iMinds aims to broaden its catchment and internationalize its Flipped program, opening it up to applicants outside of Flanders. A further potential ‘flip’ of the model may be to place researchers inside startups on a project-by-project basis for truly embedded innovation capacity. iMinds plans to trial a ‘researcher in residence’ program in 2015.

iMinds extends an open invitation to all entrepreneurs and researchers to connect with its team and discuss opportunities to further test and deploy the Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model.


FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE

TRANSFER

SERVING UP THE CLOUD TO RESTAURANTS AROUND THE WORLD

Belgian startup POSIOS launched in 2012 with an innovative point of sale (POS) solution and the ambition to become the world’s top POS app for the hospitality industry—specifically restaurants. In just two years, the company has grown from a local team of three to an international business with 23 employees and more than 700 customers worldwide. That rapid expansion caught the eye of Canada’s Lightspeed, the global leader in retail POS solutions.


In the summer of 2014, Lightspeed acquired POSIOS (now Lightspeed Restaurant), massively expanding the Belgian solution’s international reach. We talked to POSIOS founder and Lightspeed Restaurant Director of Hospitality Product, ZHONG XU, about the adventure of delivering a game-changing technology to the world market.

Q: Where did the idea for POSIOS—now Lightspeed Restaurant—come from?

Zhong Xu: Restaurants today need more systems than they used to—for online reservations, ordering, customer relationship management, the whole range. Traditional POS solutions don’t address these functions and are expensive and not so agile. You need PCs, a fixed network, you need to train users. We saw the opportunity to bring restaurant technology into the connected world. Also, there is a big regulatory driver for restaurants in Belgium and other European countries to mature their IT systems. By next year it will be mandatory for every restaurant in Belgium to connect their cash registers to a

locked server—a ‘black box’. If you don’t have that black box, you can’t run a restaurant. Restaurateurs are nervous about what this means for them. We can help.

Q: How does your application work?

Zhong Xu: We use iPads and iPhones to connect every functional area of a restaurant—bar, kitchen, waitstaff and cash—as well as other aspects of the business like loyalty programs. Using those kinds of devices gives restaurants mobility and flexibility in integrating their systems. All of this is connected through the cloud, which has two advantages. First, it doesn’t require restaurants to invest in a lot of expensive equipment. This is the disruptive part of our business model. Instead of spending 5,000 euros on IT gear, restaurateurs can buy a couple of iPads and subscribe to a complete POS solution for 50 euros a month. The other advantage of our solution being cloud-based is that it gives owners more visibility into their businesses. They can be offsite, or halfway around the world,

and log in and find out how their restaurant’s night went.

Q: Are there also benefits to restaurant customers?

Zhong Xu: When your menu is available on an iPad, you can augment it with all kinds of deeper information: ingredient lists, nutritional facts and the like. So that gives customers more information about the choices they’re making.

Q: Did you face any challenges in getting POSIOS off the ground?

Zhong Xu: Oh, sure! From a technical perspective, we had to think about how to make a cloud-based system that would meet the real-time demands of the restaurant environment. Everything has to move quickly: you can’t have lag slowing down your dinner orders. We did a lot of work to optimize its performance, and also to ensure it’s secure, because we’re dealing with people’s private data and financial transactions. So we’ve embedded FSL for HTTPS, secure tokens and other state-of-the art >>


security measures. We also put a lot of thought into how we wanted to build our business itself.

Q: How so?

Zhong Xu: My business partner, Jan Hollez, and I knew we weren’t looking to sell an idea: we wanted to build this solution and take it to market. That was a lot of work. We spent a year putting the platform together by working in our cars while carpooling to work and using all our weekends and holidays. We also knew we didn’t want to do a local launch, just in Belgium. There’s a global market for this technology and we wanted to launch to the world. So we came up with a brand and global-sounding name, built a multilingual website, and set up phone numbers in every region. We wanted to appear credible on the world stage, and it worked. In a year and a half we had offices in Singapore and across Europe. A lot of startups aim to become the biggest in their region, but when you start there, your foundation won’t necessarily let you scale when you grow. We built our app and our company to scale.

Q: How did you learn about iMinds and how did they help you launch?

Zhong Xu: Jan and I had known about iMinds from our time at the University of Ghent. We worked at a university startup supported by iMinds and went through iMinds’ iBoot program. It was iStart that helped us through the steps of starting the company, finding office space, hiring our first employee, setting up sales and marketing.

Q: Was there a technical need iMinds helped meet as well?

Zhong Xu: Absolutely. We wanted to build the fastest cloud-based POS in the world. As I mentioned, restaurants demand real-time performance. So we needed a framework for measuring the speed of the cloud. We did not have the capability to devise that kind of framework ourselves. We couldn’t have done it, so we asked iMinds.They have this thing they call the ‘flipped’ model for knowledge transfer. Instead of researchers pushing discoveries out of the lab, iMinds opens the door for startups to come in with research questions

A BLACK BOX IN EVERY RESTAURANT

The Belgian government recent ly in t roduced legislation requiring all restaurant owners to connect their cash registers to an on-site secure electronic register that will record every transaction for tax purposes. These ‘black boxes’ are an example of increasing connectivity within businesses. Germany, France and the Netherlands are all considering similar legislation.

SERVING UP THE CLOUD TO RESTAURANTS


and work with teams to get them solved. So they helped us work out a technical test with one of the iMinds research groups in Ghent. We’ve just received the test data and are analyzing it now.

Q: Why is it important for startups and small companies to have access to an organization like iMinds?

Zhong Xu: You need an organization that can back you up. As a startup, you can’t just walk into a university and commission research, but iMinds gives you the heft to get that done, because with them you’re part of a larger entity. The iMinds connection gave us instant access to good facilities and smart people. iMinds researchers devote a lot of time to projects like this at a cost that is accessible for startups.

Q: Was being acquired always your exit strategy for POSIOS? Did Lightspeed’s approach come as a surprise at this stage in the company’s development?

Zhong Xu: I think if you’re really passionate, you don’t have an exit strategy. Our goal was to conquer the world. We didn’t quit our jobs to become an SME. We wanted to be the market leader. Lightspeed gave us the opportunity to make our solution available to the world. The people involved are amazing, and the team we joined is similar to us, with a comparable business model, just a great deal bigger. Our goal was to go global, so it made sense to be a small piece of a very big company, rather than the other way around.

ABOUT LIGHTSPEED RESTAURANTThe technology developed as POSIOS is now Lightspeed Restaurant, distributed under the global Lightspeed brand. Lightspeed makes point-of-sale products for retail stores and restaurants. Today, more than 21,000 businesses in over 30 countries use Lightspeed to process $8.2 billion in transactions annually.


FINDING MARKET OPPORTUNITY THE

‘FLIPPED’ WAYWhile digitization has evolved how music is recorded, produced and distributed,

the sheet music industry has remained largely unchanged for centuries. The founders of neoScores set out to create an application to digitize and add value to sheet music. But their innovative idea might have ‘fallen on deaf ears’ without

the benefit of iMinds, whose ‘flipped’ approach to knowledge transfer helped the company discover where its true opportunity lay. We spoke to neoScores CEO BART VAN DER ROOST about how iMinds helped the startup focus its

product and business development.

FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE

TRANSFER


Q: How did the idea for neoScores come about?

Bart Van der Roost: It was born from frustration, honestly. The three of us who founded the company, we’re all trained musicians. We found it very odd that with the global transition to digital media—especially in the music industry—literally no one was looking at transposing sheet music to a digital format. When it comes to sheet music, the business model has been the same for three hundred years. Yes, today’s sheet music companies have made some use of new technology, but it’s mostly PDFs. They’re basically shipping digital paper around. There needed to be another step, another evolution, where value can be added to digital sheet music through extra features and things like that. We waited and waited for this to happen. By 2012, nobody had done it. So we figured we’d give it a shot.

Q: What did that “shot” look like?

Bart Van der Roost: At first, we were designing an app that we thought would make musicians happy. But we started an iMinds Living Lab project and found out musicians already had solutions for digital sheet music and didn’t want any of our bells and whistles—audio playback, syncing adaptations, those kinds of things. They wanted clear scores, and the opportunity to share with their network of musicians and friends. Music is, in essence, a social thing, and that was the new emphasis of the customer side of our business.

Q: How does neoScores meet those customer-side needs?

Bart Van der Roost: We went to the content owners to access official professional scores: the Mozarts, the Bernsteins, musicals,

everything users want available in a digital format. We signed up the content owners and producers to create a marketplace. We still have an app with added features—you

can annotate scores, share them, remove parts of the score that you’re not interested in at the moment, highlight others. But the main business model was to gather official content and create the marketplace. You could think of neoScores as an iTunes or Spotify for sheet music. We’re taking the music we cherish and helping it make the transition to the digital age.

Q: Was it easy to get content owners interested in evolving their product?

Bart Van der Roost: It took some time to get them on board, honestly. Their existing business model is fairly deeply engrained, but we showed them early versions of the application and convinced them. We had a proof of concept in 2012, and we went live with the full consumer version in December 2014.

Q: How did iMinds help you in the early stages of product development?

Bart Van der Roost: As I mentioned, our new business model came directly from their support and guidance. They’ve been immensely helpful throughout the process, from our early days until now. When we first had the idea for neoScores, we got in touch with the Belgian Chamber of Commerce, and they introduced us to iMinds. We pitched them our idea, and they pointed out that we were really lacking market data. So, they put us in

IMINDS GAVE US ACCESS TO FREE ADVICE FROM SOME

OF THEIR TOP DIGITAL SECURITY

RESEARCHERS. “

“

>>


their Living Lab program to learn about the needs and pain points of our potential customers. We went from that Living Lab to iStart, which is an incubation program for promising young companies. Then we advanced to the Go Global selection, which is for companies that iMinds determines may have the potential for a significant global impact. That’s a great program, because they support your travel around the world, which is one thing, but then they connect you with the right people in all the places you visit. So, you network and get insights on the spot, get introduced to VCs, investors, researchers. That’s the real value. They get you to where you need to go, and connect you to the right network when you’re there.

Q: iMinds talks about ‘flipping’ traditional knowledge transfer so that research is driven by the needs

of startups like neoScores. Did you have that experience?

Bart Van der Roost: iMinds connected us with an iMinds-KU Leuven research group, DistriNet, that’s working on digital security. Security is always a concern in digital marketplaces, and iMinds gave us access to free advice from some of their top researchers in the field. Because of that—because we were able to develop a totally secure product, we were able to strike a lot of deals with content owners. That, of course, presented us with a new challenge: scaling up operationally. Three of us founded neoScores, and we’re musicians, right? We needed to progress from three guys with a decent idea to a company that can satisfy the needs of its customers. Again, here’s iMinds. They connected us with an experienced entrepreneur—and helped us with the fee—to advise

IMINDS GUIDES AND

SUPPORT YOU IN YOUR OWN

DECISIONS.

FINDING MARKET OPPORTUNITY THE ‘FLIPPED’ WAY


us on how to scale up quickly and efficiently. And they’ve got a great coaching system that was there to support us throughout the process, making sure we were still happy with running a company and that we didn’t feel overwhelmed.

Q: It sounds like iMinds has had a real impact.

Bart Van der Roost: Absolutely. But it’s not just us. The Belgian start-up ecosystem, honestly, did not exist in 2012. We just didn’t have the infrastructure and the support. Good Belgians worked for the government, or a big company. The entrepreneurial culture just wasn’t there. Today, we’ve noticed that something is changing in Belgium. The start-up culture has grown, established itself. The vibe has changed. The ecosystem has been built up, and I attribute a lot of

that to iMinds, and the companies they’ve supported.

Q: What is it about iMinds, do you think, that has helped companies be so successful?

Bart Van der Roost: What I love about iMinds is their guidance. They don’t tell you what to do, they don’t lead you down a path, they just guide and support you in your own decisions. They just help you when you need it, and let you grow and learn on your own when you don’t. They can provide seed money and funding, of course, but to me, that’s the least valuable service they offer. They provide access to knowledge, the keys to innovation—for example, through their notion of flipping knowledge transfer so research is driven by entrepreneurs’ needs. And they do it all at your pace, not theirs.

ABOUT NEOSCORESneoScores is a web application that allows musicians to safely download, use and share sheet music. Its intelligent sheet music is responsive and automatically adapts to the screens of smartphones, tablets or computers on any operating system. neoScores was founded in July 2013 by professional musicians with a passion for new media and in 2014 won the Foxconn Prize at the Startup Nations Summit. neoScores is also part of the European Tech All Stars and is supported by iMinds and Start it @KBC.


PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH JUST GOT A

WHOLE LOT FASTERIn pharmaceutical research, time really is money. But with thousands of

health research databases around the world accumulating highly specialized information on an almost daily basis, research findings have essentially become

unsearchable. Flemish entrepreneur HANS CONSTANDT is changing that with his company, Ontoforce, by using semantic web technology to expedite

pharmaceutical research.

FLIPPED KNOWLEDGE

TRANSFER


It was the experience of working with Ontoforce—helping the company solve the technical challenges it needed to address to make its solution market ready—that first spurred iMinds to develop its ‘flipped’ model for knowledge transfer. In the flipped paradigm, startups like Ontoforce become the drivers of research projects instead of receiving research knowledge created in isolation from their real-world needs.

We sat down with Hans to find out how iMinds helped him get the company off the ground and into the marketplace.

Q: Where did the Ontoforce concept come from?

Hans Constandt: It goes right back to my childhood, in a way. When I was born, I had malaria, and out of that experience I decided I wanted to be a doctor. I went all the way to fourth year in medical school, but along the way I got into ICT and something about that really grabbed me. I was better with technology than I was at patients’ bedsides. So I switched over to bioinformatics and that led

me to work in the pharmaceutical sector. I spent nearly 10 years working in a big pharma company. Like most industries today, there’s a pressure to do more with less in that sector now, and speeding up the research process seemed like a key opportunity area.

Q: So you set out to find ways of making pharmaceutical information more searchable using ‘semantic web’ techniques. What is the semantic web?

Hans Constandt: The first web, Web 1.0, was a web of documents. Web 2.0 is a web for the people, where anyone can put content online but it is impossible to search. The semantic web, which will be Web 3.0, is essentially the web of data—and key to it will be searchability. I like to give this example because it seems to catch people’s attention: say you’re a business traveler and you’re looking to stay at the Hilton in Paris. If you Google “Paris Hilton”, your top result isn’t likely to be a hotel. Semantics is about disambiguating queries and interpreting results to get people to the information they’re actually looking for, without

IMINDS HAS BROUGHT THE

SILICON VALLEY MODEL TO FLANDERS. “

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>>


them having to know exactly where to start or how to phrase the query themselves.

Q: How does this apply to pharmaceuticals?

Hans Constandt: Scientists today are very time-pressured, and smaller biotech companies don’t have the resources to aggregate data. But out there on the web are thousands of health research databases —clinical trials, literature reviews, patient studies and the like. So how do you get to a fast result if you’re looking for information on a very specific topic—say, growth hormone applications for a particular disease—and you want to be comprehensive without spending a month searching manually? Our tool, disQover, concatenates the data—right now, from 30 databases—compares it, identifies linkages and visualizes the search path. So you can zero in very quickly on the information you want and see exactly how you got there.

Q: How did you get involved with iMinds?

Hans Constandt: We started the company in 2011. Even though I came from pharma, we initially conceived of our tool for the education sector.

My son has a learning disability and I could see ways semantics would help kids like him academically. We were pitching around for money and got involved with iMinds’ iStart program. People think of iMinds as a technical organization—and it is—but they are very serious about building entrepreneurial skills and capacity. They said to me, “Hans, the education market doesn’t have the economics to support your tool.” That’s when we started looking at targeting DisQover to pharma. This is a thing about iMinds: they’re very polite, but they’re firm. They impose discipline on entrepreneurs. So they pushed me out of my “golden cage” and got me to write a business plan and prove out the feasibility of the product.

Q: What would you say has been the main benefit of your engagement with iMinds?

Hans Constandt: The access to expertise. Raising money is much less of a problem than getting good, expert advice and building a network. iMinds has brought the Silicon Valley model to Flanders, which was missing. If you are a first-time startup, you get hit with an avalanche once you’re out of the gate. iMinds helps you deal with it.

AS PART OF THE ISTART

EXPERIENCE, WE DID A

FEASIBILITY STUDY WITH IMINDS’

MULTIMEDIA LAB. “

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PHARMACEUTICAL RESEARCH JUST GOT A WHOLE LOT FASTER


Q: And your involvement with iMinds has continued?

Hans Constandt: Yes. As part of the iStart experience, we did a feasibility study with iMinds’ Multimedia Lab, or MMLab. We also applied for ICON project funding, but we didn’t fully meet the consortium requirements. We put in for IWT funding instead, because IWT funds projects involving just two parties, and we won that. What was great was that after the feasibility study, MMLab continued to work on our technology, so that when we came back, they had a solution for us that addressed some of the technical requirements. From my understanding, this was where iMinds first got the idea to reverse the traditional knowledge transfer flow that’s at the heart of their Flipped Knowledge Transfer Model. It’s exciting to think we were part of that. We bought the IP from them and licensed it back to iMinds for other research. Having access to their research capacity has been a huge accelerator for us. When you’re a company of five or 10 people, you just don’t have the means to do it yourself. Today we have a bilateral research agreement with MMLab to continue refining our solution.

Q: You mentioned building a network. We understand that network now includes Harvard University?

Hans Constandt: That’s iMinds again! The European market is very fragmented, and of course the U.S. is very big, so iMinds has a Go Global program to help entrepreneurs reach out beyond Flanders. They get investors to come over and look at companies and their solutions. We put in for Go Global support and said where we wanted to go. First we went to MIT and got into their accelerator program, which helped us refine our business model. That was a stepping-stone to Harvard, which has its eagle-i catalyst program that is focused on opening up access to data beyond public databases.

Q: What’s next for Ontoforce?

Hans Constandt: Well, we’re not Google or Facebook yet, so we have some room to grow. But our product, disQover, is fully commercial and in the marketplace. We’re continuing to evolve it—expanding our database, the databases we draw from. With our next round of funding, we’ll expand to a team of about 30 people; we’re at about 10 right now. And we’re continuing to look for

opportunities to demonstrate our value to pharma-sector customers. If you can show with one drug that you’ve saved a company a day of time, that’s a million dollars for them. That’s a compelling business case.

ABOUT ONTOFORCEOntoforce is a leading company in semantic technologies with an innovative solution to improve information management, acknowledged by respected institutes and industry players including IWT, MIT, Gartner and iMinds.


SVEN DE CLEYNiMinds Incubation Programs

LIST OF SUBJECT-MATTER EXPERTS WHO CONTRIBUTED TO THIS PAPER

HANS CONSTANDT CEO Ontoforce

SVEN DE CLEYNIncubation Programs iMinds

STAN DE VOCHTIP & Tech Transfer iMinds

FRANK GIELENDirector Incubation & Entrepreneurship iMinds

BART VAN DER ROOSTCEO neoScores

ZHONG XUDirector of Hospitality ProductLightspeed Restaurant

iMinds editorial team: Sven De Cleyn, Koen De Vos, Thomas Kallstenius, Els Van Bruystegem,

Wim Van Daele, Stefan Vermeulen

Copy: Ascribe Communications

Design: Coming-Soon.be

Photography: Lieven Dirckx, Nils Blanckaert, Alexander Popelier

Promotion: Aimee Bacallan

©2015 iMinds vzw - CC-BY 4.0. You are free to share and adapt the content in this publication

with reference to iMinds.

Additional content will be published on www.iminds.be/insights

FOR MORE INFORMATION

about iMinds’ collaboration between start-ups and researchers, please contact Sven De [email protected], +32 9 331 48 36


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