Yumana’s Great Ambitions: Céline Degreef Featured on BSMART
Céline Degreef, CEO of Yumana, is a guest on the set of Grands Paris de l’Entreprise, a program on the BSMART business channel.
Céline Bosquet interviews her to learn more about Yumana’s bold ambitions for 2021. (In french)
Innovate and Engage: Yumana’s Dual Promise for Businesses
Yumana is a collaborative innovation platform that supports companies in their intrapreneurship initiatives, is that right?
Exactly. Yumana offers two digital solutions that allow clients to engage their employees in just a few clicks. The solution helps them accelerate and bring to life their innovation and intrapreneurship initiatives.
From Ideas to Real-World Impact: The Benefits and Opportunities with Yumana
What are the opportunities and benefits for companies?
To clearly illustrate the benefits of such programs for businesses, I often start with the example of a client we’ve been supporting for several years. At Enedis, one employee once asked why pollution levels weren’t measured at human height, rather than placing sensors on rooftops. He came up with the idea of equipping his vehicle with a pollution sensor to collect data during his rounds. He then submitted his idea through our digital platform.
The idea matured, and Enedis Paris decided to equip its entire fleet in the capital — 400 vehicles — with the device. This enabled them to gather and consolidate valuable data, which was also shared with the City of Paris.
Our platform truly helps bring ideas to life and turn them into successes. Thanks to a wide range of features, employees can easily engage and drive their company’s innovation efforts. Organizing ideation challenges, launching continuous innovation initiatives, or structuring full intrapreneurship programs becomes simple and centralized on the Yumana platform.
Has the health crisis reinforced companies’ desire to become more agile through intrapreneurship?
The crisis somewhat slowed down companies’ ambition to launch intrapreneurship programs. These are, after all, relatively costly initiatives. As a result, large corporations have had to rethink their approach to these topics. While there has been a slight decline in intrapreneurship programs, it has been offset by a rise in collaborative innovation initiatives and ideation challenges.
The goal for companies was often to improve existing internal processes or to share best practices at the group level, for example. That said, in 2021, we started seeing renewed interest from our clients in launching intrapreneurship programs.
What are Yumana’s major ambitions for 2021?
First and foremost, we’re betting on growth. Yumana was created last year from the merger of two former competitors in the collaborative innovation market. This allowed us to double in size — in terms of team, clients, and revenue. All of this strengthens our legitimacy and helps us solidify our position as a market leader in France.
We also launched a new consulting offering this year. We now support our clients in designing and running their collaborative innovation and intrapreneurship programs. We’ve seen that the success of these initiatives is closely linked to having the right best practices in place, and we’re delighted to be able to share our expertise.
Another key commitment for us is the environment. One of our team members who joined us this year played a major role in kick-starting Yumana’s CSR strategy. We’ve adopted a CSR charter, implemented a digital tool to manage our social and solidarity efforts, and organized several concrete initiatives, such as a collection drive for Emmaüs. We have many more projects in mind to continue improving.
By implementing our digital platform for clients, we enable them to engage a large number of employees and structure all their solidarity initiatives. So, for us, it was equally important to allow our own Yumanists to get involved!
Is Yumana self-financed?
Yes, we are currently self-financed. In fact, one of our current ambitions is to explore additional funding opportunities to give ourselves the means to achieve our goals.
Thank you to B Smart and Céline Bosquet for inviting us to talk about Yumana. For anyone who would like to stay updated on our news, feel free to follow us on our social media channels.
Together for a more collaborative, positive, and supportive world.
CEO & Co-Founder Yumana
