NLO announces partnership with Scaleup Vlaanderen
As an entrepreneur, you frequently come up with brilliant ideas that can significantly boost your business. A new product, a new way of working, a piece of code that speeds up software... These are all insights that not only distinguish your company but also give it a competitive advantage. How do you ensure that it stays that way?
For both large and small businesses
NLO now has a team of 16 people in Belgium and serves a large number of Flemish scaleups as clients. 'We know the sector inside out and continue to grow. Our client portfolio is very diverse, which is a big advantage. We can apply the expertise we gain from large companies to startups. Since a patent is valid for 20 years, you want it to remain relevant for two decades. Of course, for a startup that is constantly changing, this isn't always easy. That is why we focus on the business challenges of scaleups in order to anticipate how customers will use their product or service in the future. We offer significant discounts to startups and scaleups during the first year, when we do the majority of our work.’
Partnership
A partnership with Scaleup Vlaanderen was therefore a logical step, says Sader. 'A lot of startups often seek intellectual property expertise too late. They want to enter the market quickly to be the first. Their invention is then publicly known, making it more difficult to protect it. In addition, we have also become partners because incorrect information about what one can patent circulates. Entrepreneurs make assumptions and often fail to patent their innovations when they could have. We are here to assist them with this.'
Source: Thomas Smolders - Scale up Vlaanderen
This interview is part of Scaleup Vlaanderen. For the whole interview, please go to their website:
About Scaleup Vlaanderen
Scaleup Vlaanderen is organized by the Belgian technology federation Agoria, by startup accelerator imec.istart and by the collective center of the technology industry Sirris. The integrated and complementary offer of Scaleup Flanders helps participating companies to efficiently build a sustainable business.
Although the focus will be on guiding scale-ups, the various building blocks in the program cover two of the most crucial life phases of ambitious growth companies:
- The startup phase, in which a product-market fit is sought.
- The scale-up phase, in which growth and the scaling up of activities on an international level are sought.