Olivier Ezratty, consultant and author
olivier(at)oezratty.net, https://www.oezratty.net, @olivez
What I am doing
I’m helping customers build their innovation strategies (business plans, products roadmaps, marketing and ecosystems strategies). Since 2005, I have helped companies in various verticals such as television (TF1, RTS-SSR, SES Astra, TDF, Euro Media Group, Netgem), telecoms (Bouygues Télécom, Orange, …), consumer goods (LG Electronics, groupe Seb, L’Oréal, Alt Group), industries (Schneider Electric, …) as well with finance and insurance (Crédit Agricole, Crédit Mutuel-CIC, BPCE, Société Générale, Natixis, Groupama). I’m a regular conference speaker for corporation events, both internal and external, in French as well as in English.
I am helping the startups ecosystem, with doing technology and business due-diligence missions for various investment funds.
- Expert at the Wilco accelerator, in the healthcare vertical.
- Member of the Prospective Board of the french telecom regulatory organization ARCEP since end of 2015.
- Advisor to the INVST I/O fund dedicated to Internet of Things.
- Member of various entrepreneurship competitions juries such as the Paris Grand Innovation Prize, or the Startup Academy.
- Expert for the innovation cluster Cap Digital as well as for the Caisse des Dépôts and CNC (public cinema funding board).
I’m a university guest speaker, covering innovation strategies and entrepreneurship at various schools like Ecole Centrale Paris, HEC, Telecom Paristech and Neoma Business School.
I created my blog “Opinions Libres” in 2006 with an audience of corporate marketing, strategy and economic intelligence executives, students, researchers, investors, entrepreneurs and medias. Each January, I publish a comprensive Las Vegas CES report every year since 2006 (the 2018 edition had 400 pages). I also publish the “Startup Guide”, the most thorough entrepreneurship guide in France. It has been downloaded more than 300 000 times in 12 years since its inception and is regularly updated, now at least once a year.
My background
I have over 33 years of experience in software research and development, marketing and business development. I started in 1985 at Sogitec, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dassault Aviation, as a software design engineer, then project manager and group manager of the 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 was Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft France between 1998 and 2001 ans then created the Developer and Platform Evangelism Division. This organization of 50+ launched the « .NET » platform, new partnerships with the best universities, research organizations and local software vendors, as well the first Microsoft startup programs in France. I left Microsoft in 2005 to become a freelance contributor to the innovation ecosystem in France.
I graduated in 1985 from Ecole Centrale Paris with a Computer Science Msc equivalent.
Pictures of me can be found here.
