The Studio: A Startup-Factory to White-label Existing Corporate Assets — Intrapreneur Stories #4

Featuring Gil Nimmegeers, intrapreneur at Belfius.

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As one of Belgium’s biggest banks, Belfius has developed several assets that facilitate internal processes and improve their services and connection to clients. But most of these services could also be applied to other companies, and even other markets.

On this episode of Intrapreneur Stories, we sit together with Gil Nimmegeers, Innovation Manager at The Studio.

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The Studio is an innovation hub that diagnoses pain points within the bank and generates solutions that help not only their own clients but everyone else too – either by selling their services to other corporations (Spencr) or by offering it directly to the public (Pengo).

“Different departments actually come to us and tell us about a problem or tell us about a need. And then maybe it’s a solution they will implement in their process or maybe it’s something we see as an asset that we think “Okay, maybe this is not the only place where they have that problem. They can maybe have it in other companies too.” (…) Can we maybe package this application into a white labelled application so we can offer this as a service B2B to companies?”

In the Interview:

• What is The Studio — 0:33
• A startup/scaleup factory — 2:50
• When to spin-off internal projects — 5:41
• Pinpointing the right needs within a company – 6:53
• From bank analyst to innovation manager — 8:14
• Utilising and managing the corporation’s assets — 8:57
• The process of setting up The Studio — 10:12
• White-labeling Belfius’s mobile application — 11:17
• The sales-first strategy for validation — 12:14
• Finding the optimal team setup — 13:23
• Competition and collaboration with other startups — 17:22
• Is intrapreneurship necessary? — 19:45
• Maintaining a startup mentality within a corporate environment — 24:18
• Validating assumptions before getting involved in bureaucracy — 26:45

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