On this page, you will find two videos (and additional support material) related to a conference on Innovation, I gave on March 23, 2020 at the ESPO faculty of the UCLouvain, in the frame of the “Cours d’économie publique en BAC 3 économie et gestion (LECGE 1312)” of Professor Jean Hindriks.

This conference is based on the Chapter 4 of the course LBIR1360 “Operations and Management of enterprises” that I’m giving to the BAC3 students of the Faculty of Bio-engineering. This course is based on my experience of entrepreneur and is sharing some of the basics that should be useful to young or mature entrepreneurs.

1 You first have to watch a short TED-X video on “The Art of Successful Innovation”.

This video is in English and takes about 12 minutes. You can of course pause, accelerate or step back when needed. If you want to activate the subtitles which are available in English, French or Spanish play the video in youtube and activate the subtitle in the preference menu of Youtube.

2 Then, you can start watching the long video on “innovation and competition”.

This video is in French (slides in English) and takes approximately 55 minutes. You can of course pause, accelerate or step back when needed…

3 Some additional elements can help you to better understand the IRIS technologies and innovations presented in this conference and how the first innovation of IRIS has led to the development of adjacent innovations and of a very diversified portfolio of solutions.

3.1. The following PDF illustrates the original OCR technology developed by IRIS.

• The first slide (dated from 1988) illustrates the purpose of the OCR (Optical Character Recognition Technology). Convert the image of a document into an editable document that includes recognized text
• Slide 2 shows the logo of IRIS and the vision to become the eye (with the associated brain power) of the computer. We target a range of applications.
• Slide 3 illustrates the complexity of Omnifont OCR and the variety of technologies that need to be used for sophisticated Artificial Intelligence.
• Slide 4 illustrates the potential of this technologies that allowed IRIS to create a vast portfolio of customers for many different kind of applications for consumer users and professional users.

3.2 The following video illustrate the implementation of this technology in a unique product developed by IRIS for the consumer market. The core OCR Omonifont OCR technology is one of the elements used to create a unique product, the IRISPen, opens scanner with text recognition capability which is fully portable and has a very low price point.

3.3. The following 3 videos illustrate the use of the OCR technology for professional applications. In this case, a very expensive system to scan and encode the VAT Tax Forms automatically. The handprinted data are automatically encoded with virtually no mistakes, thanks to sophisticated technologies that allow to catch and fix any potential problem.

3.4 The IRIS Book is intended to be a roadbook for entrepreneurs. It presents keys for successful entrepreneurship, and is designed to share real-life experience.

More specifically Chapter 4 presents 5 different types of innovations and the lessons that can be learned from these case studies by other entrepreneurs.

3.5 Do not hesitate to visit other sections of this site which contain articles and publications about innovation and entrepreneurship. For instance, the section “In the News contains a number of articles published in L’Echo on several aspects of Entrepreneurship.