Bio (English)

Olivier Ezratty, Innovation Strategies Consulting

olivier(at)oezratty.net, http://www.oezratty.net.

What I am doing

I am a freelance ICT consultant at the crossroads of technology, marketing, management and sociology. I am focused in four directions: 

• With startups: I coach young entrepreneurs seeking external help to refine their business plan and their marketing strategies. I do this either directly or through various organizations like INRIA Transfert or Scientipôle. I cover the whole startup lifecycle from project inception, to the various stages of growth.  
• With large organizations, like the Crédit Agricole or L’Oréal, to help them take advantage of the various innovations coming out of the great digital convergence in their marketing and communication strategies. My support range from techno-screening to strategic thinking coaching, conferences, seminars and training.

• Upstream, with university students, as a faculty covering innovation strategies and projects coach.
• At last, towards a larger audience and my blog, to share experiences on innovation, entrepreneurship, software, the Internet and digital convergence. I publish many reference documents like my yearly Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show report.

With whom ?

I started my freelance activity back in September 2005, and particularly with the following businesses:

• U.Lik, a recommendation Internet site combining social cataloging and collaborative filtering engines. It enables users to create their library of tastes in the entertainment space and to get highly tailored suggestions for both entertainment and people who share similar tastes. I am an active business angel in this company and member of its board.
• ZapMeeting, a small business helping people in organizations to manage their presentations more efficiently. Its offer includes zSoft Pilot, a gyroscopic remote control coupled with a software managing the sequence of your presentations with slides, videos, music, pictures, web sites, Excel, PDF or other documents. They also created the zPod, an integrated combination of all the hardware and software required to manage presentations : computing, video, sound, microphones, remotes. It includes the zSoft Pilot remote and software. 
• Voluntis, a patient records management company based on a multichannel portal platform. It helps patients of various pathologies like diabetis to better handle their treatment.

I also had the opportunity to work for Skyrock (Skyblogs), for Miyowa (mobile instant messaging platform vendor) and for Axa Private Equity (startups due diligences). Countless the various projects I still can’t divulgate!

I am also an Expert with INRIA Transfert, as well as an expert and selection committee member at Scientipôle Initiative.

At last, I am a faculty at Ecole Centrale Paris, in the ICT 3rd year curriculum, where I teach on innovation strategies and coach students projects. I also participate to the HEC MBA as a lecturer in the crisis management elective run by Michel Safars.

My background

I have 22 years of experience in software research and development, marketing and business development. I started my career in 1985 at Sogitec, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault Aviation, where I was a software design engineer then project manager and group manager of a development team working on custom electronic publishing projects. I then became an early adopter of the Windows platform, starting projects on its initial 1.0 release.

Starting in 1990, I then acquired at Microsoft France a broad experience in all dimensions of marketing: products, channels, customer, communication and public relations. I launched the first version of Visual Basic in 1991 as well as Windows NT in 1993, and a bunch of partner programs. All these are now IT industry standards. I became Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft France in July 1998 where I reengineered internal and external communication tools, charter, processes and vendors, reshaped its public relations including starting dealing with government institutions, managed customer’s and partner’s transition to Year 2000 and Euro, consolidated its call centre and telesales operations and also launched Windows 2000 and Office 2000.

In May 2001, I became Director of the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division which I created and staffed for the France region. This organization of 50+ is chartered with driving the adoption of the Microsoft enterprise platform by software developers, IT professionals, software vendors, as well as with the computer science academia and research. I launched the « .NET » platform, new partnerships with the best universities, research organizations and local software vendors, as well as initiated the first strategic .NET projects with large accounts across many industries.

I graduated in 1985 from Ecole Centrale Paris with a Computer Science Msc equivalent.