NUMA: innovation champion à la française

Silicon Sentier was once an association of geeks built on the model of Italian clusters‚ but now it has transformed itself in order to meet the needs of its community and of the start-ups which developed there. What first began as a group of friends has now become an ecosystem for growth which initially spread outside Paris and then throughout the world, opening franchises in Moscow‚ Casablanca and Bangalore. For the past fifteen years, Marie-Vorgan Le Barzic has been in charge of this ‘Unidentified Innovative Object’ which has gone from a coworking space called ‘La Cantine’, to a start-up accelerator called ‘Le Camping’‚ and then to an open innovation system where large companies come and try to learn the methods necessary to reinvent themselves. In 2015‚ the association made itself into a company and changed its name to NUMA. In one month, it raised more than one million Euros of crowd equity before raising 4.6 million Euros from private investors. This enabled it to invest in start-ups (where it acts as an accelerator) and to finance its international growth.