Yann LeMoël
Yann LeMoël is a seasoned angel investor and the founder of Living Labs Federation, a global accelerator with a focus on forging strategic global and local partnerships for sustainable and intentional project development. After dedicating over two decades of his career to the corporate world, Yann decided to leverage his vast experience and expertise to support and invest in “Tech for Good” companies.
What we learnt
What we learnt
In an interview with Yann LeMoël, founder of Living Labs, he shared how he became an angel investor and founded a company to support early-stage sustainable innovation. Having worked in large corporations in aerospace, aluminium, and oil and gas, Yann recognized the challenge of changing the traditional economy to support impact innovation. He established Living Labs to build acceleration programs for initiators and innovators with a long-term vision to turn sustainable ideas into businesses.
Yann's approach is to connect the right people globally. He believes that collaboration is the key to success and stresses the importance of connecting local communities to address sustainability challenges and promote entrepreneurship. He highlights the need for acceleration programs that cater to both initiators and innovators, creating a network of individuals who share the same values and vision for boosting sustainability innovation. Yann cites the success story of a Thai startup that helped reduce food waste in restaurants to illustrate the potential of impactful innovation.
Regarding governance and achieving a clear purpose and impact, Yann believes that shared management, internal management cooperatives, and fully decentralized options are viable governance models. He acknowledges the challenge of managing a decentralized model and ensuring that new members align with the common vision. Yann emphasizes that intentionality is the key to achieving the desired impact and that having a clear vision from purpose to impact is essential to achieving that goal.
Yann also proposes a framework for setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that match the company's intentions. The KPIs should fulfill the intention, and there should be no return or setting up of KPIs. He stresses the importance of measuring impact and proposes the use of Norton and Kaplan's balanced scorecard for financial impact. Yann believes that technology should be used to be more efficient with energy and to provide global communication, but it should not be relied upon as the sole solution to the world's problems.
In summary, Yann emphasizes the importance of blended financing, proper governance, clear purpose and impact, and measuring impact to achieve impactful results. He also believes that being well-connected to the right people globally is crucial to the success of collaborations.
Key quotes
‘ If you want to create impact startups and impact ventures, ‘hunting for unicorns’ doesn't work. We have to switch to what we call "breeding zebras", zebras being Triple Bottom Line companies.’
‘There is a power asymmetry between the lender and the borrower. In any instance where there is a power asymmetry, it would be interesting to consider how to have openness without letting one party take advantage.’’
‘I would say one of the things we're trying to do, that's lacking, is connecting all those local people. It's super complicated, like if you're in Mauritius, how do you find the startup in Thailand with your solution? How do you connect to the expert in Singapore to manage your project and help you do it? And those big global collaboration projects are usually led by large organisations, right? You can do it top-down when you have less money, but it's hard to do it bottom-up.’
‘Even after investing in a company, the impact may change as plans develop. For example, a company may try to employ fewer people, which is good for the business, but not so good for the number of women who benefit. This is an important consideration.’
‘Maybe having some kind of event where everybody came together and brainstormed and built some kind of action. Personally, I think making it easy to lower the barriers to meeting could actually be quite useful.’