Bio (English)

Publié le 25 mai 2006 et mis à jour le 26 août 2010 - Commenter -

Oli­vier Ezratty, Inno­va­tion Stra­te­gies Consulting

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

What I am doing

I am a free­lance consul­tant focu­sing on digi­tal media tech­no­lo­gies and ser­vices with a broad range of interventions :

• With large orga­ni­za­tions, like tele­com ope­ra­tors, hard­ware manu­fac­tu­rers and soft­ware ven­dors, to sup­port them in their busi­ness and mar­ke­ting stra­te­gies with sup­port inclu­ding techno-screening to stra­te­gic thin­king coa­ching, pro­duct road­map defi­ni­tions, confe­rences, semi­nars and training.
• 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 Scien­ti­pôle Ini­tia­tive or invest­ment funds. I cover the whole star­tup life­cycle from pro­ject incep­tion to the various stages of growth.
• Ups­tream, with uni­ver­sity stu­dents, as a faculty cove­ring inno­va­tion stra­te­gies and pro­jects coach.

At last, towards a lar­ger audience with my blog, to share expe­riences on inno­va­tion, entre­pre­neur­ship and digi­tal medias. The blog has two spe­ci­fics : about one long in-depth post publi­shed every week, and being the repo­si­tory of many refe­rence docu­ments like my yearly Las Vegas Consu­mer Elec­tro­nics Show report and a refe­rence guide for entre­pre­neurs in France, both down­loa­ded more than 15K every year. Most of this stuff is publi­shed in French although some posts can be in English. My blog is read mainly by cor­po­rate mar­ke­ting, stra­tegy and eco­no­mic intel­li­gence exe­cu­tives, stu­dents, resear­chers, inves­tors, entre­pre­neurs and journalists.

With whom ?

I star­ted my free­lance acti­vity back in Sep­tem­ber 2005.

In the Cor­po­rate space, I have wor­ked or am cur­rently wor­king for Bouygues Tele­com, SFR, LG Elec­tro­nics (mobile busi­ness), Net­gem (set-top-box com­pany), Sky­rock (Sky­blogs). I also coach more tra­di­tio­nal busi­nesses in their digi­tal stra­te­gies such as L’Oréal / May­bel­line, Cré­dit Agri­cole and Groupama.

I am an expert and selec­tion com­mit­tee mem­ber & pre­sident, and board mem­ber at Scien­ti­pôle Ini­tia­tive (a orga­ni­za­tion pro­vi­ding loans to very early stage com­pa­nies) as well as with the Fina­rea and AMCI funds. I have wor­ked for various grown-up star­tups like Miyowa (mobile ins­tant mes­sa­ging plat­form ven­dor) as well as with invest­ment funds like Axa Pri­vate Equity and iSource Ges­tion (for star­tups due diligences).

I’m inves­ted in ULike, a recom­men­da­tion Inter­net site com­bi­ning social cata­lo­ging and col­la­bo­ra­tive fil­te­ring engines. I am also a mem­ber of the board for Dar­q­room, a web pro­fes­sio­nal photo sha­ring and prin­ting site.

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 on the cri­sis mana­ge­ment anti­ci­pa­tion elec­tive run by Michel Safars.

My back­ground

I have 25 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.