One day, Pierre Bellon, founder of Sodexo, who made the company he created a world champion, answered the following question: “What explains Sodexo’s success?” His answer was wonderful in my opinion: “The sum of our successes is slightly greater than the sum of our failures.” An SME manager knows that failure is part of the road to success, and that it is a source of continuous improvement.

Before creating PME Centrale in 2001, I had created my first company in Sydney, which was a kind of first cousin, so to speak. It met the same objective: to pool SME resources to make them stronger and more together. This Australian company did not work. Among the mistakes I made, the most significant was probably the following: I prepared my offer with my partners on the basis of the intuition I had, and once the offer was packaged, after many months, I went to meet prospects. It was a failure... The idea was perceived as excellent, but the SME owners I met were not ready to change: I was thinking too far in advance; the step was too significant to take, etc. So, by creating PME Centrale in France, two years later in 2003, and Qantis in 2018, I proceeded completely differently: I kept my intuition (which was the same!), and I co-constructed the offer with the first members. It was not easy, but it eventually worked, because we adapted the offer to their needs and, little by little, are broadening our scope of proposals. Since then, all Qantis subsidiaries and brands have been created according to the same process. Our customers are at the heart of the innovation process and the creation of new projects. We have also included it in the baseline of the Qantis collaborative platform: “Co-create, Connect, Commit.”

In my opinion, the collaborative phenomenon can become an asset to put up your entrepreneurial sleeve, and a source of permanent innovation for SMEs. In the book Ensemble on va plus loin, which I co-wrote with Antoine Pivot, we describe how to implement this collaborative economy and how it allows managers to develop their companies in collaboration with their stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, etc.). Here are three simple principles, taken from the book, to integrate the collaborative economy into an SME.

First principle: put the customer back at the center! It is difficult to create a company, convince its first customers and then recruit its first employees, train them and achieve a certain balance in which profits feed the progressive development of the structure. It is so difficult to reach this moment when everything seems to be working, when customers are satisfied and employees are invested, that the simple idea of rethinking everything to get the machine running again can frighten many people. The problem is that, unconsciously, each company is gradually moving away from the full satisfaction of its customers. Soon, efforts become more limited, innovation is less voluntary, desire less present, etc. In fact, the customer leaves their natural place at the heart of the company to leave it to habits and formulas such as “we’ve always done it this way”.

The collaborative economy challenges these behaviors, because this model consists of building its service with a community of customers. In other words, it is the community that decides, and the company responds to its needs. The interest here is that customers are very often on both sides: they participate in the creation of the service and they consume it. They therefore know how to continuously improve the offer since they play the role of both suppliers and customers. For the company, it is “only necessary to” analyze their behavior and listen to their needs in order to constantly innovate.

Second principle: create a community of trust. The great success of the collaborative economy is that it has won the battle of trust. Its purpose is to enable clients gathered in a community to also provide services to each other, for example carpoolers for BlaBlaCar, companies for PME Centrale and Qantis. In short, “Together we are stronger and we go further”. These communities often existed before these companies, but there was no tool to make it easy and intuitive to connect them. And, of course, offering a simple digital platform is not enough. Moreover, at PME Centrale, we started without a platform. The most important thing was to create the conditions for trust between community members, and between the community and the company. BlaBlaCar, for example, surveyed its users and found that those they trusted most were their friends and family, then just after that, other BlaBlaCar users with a good rating on the platform, and much further away, their own neighbors! In other words, they trust strangers in the same community more than people they encounter every day.

How is that possible? These platforms have endeavored to create a system that values quality and compliance with the commitment made. Almost always via notes that users give each other, and also through video training of new members, charters, etc. At Qantis, it is the team that plays this role by being in permanent contact, in the field, with our stakeholders to verify the quality of our framework agreements and the implementation of our commitment.

Third principle: give meaning and return to common sense. The other success of the collaborative economy is to give or restore meaning. And what better way to promote team management than a shared sense! After all, in the end, customers and employees pursue the same objective: to ensure the permanence of the community with which they identify. The functioning of some cannot be contrary to the functioning of others. If employees and customers identify themselves to the community, it is because their membership in this particular group is meaningful. Let’s mention Airbnb and its dream: “a world where all of us can belong anywhere”... a world where we are at home everywhere. With friends, family, at home... in France as in Tanzania. And that’s the welcome message on the platform: “Welcome home!”

Concerning this third principle, it seems to me that collaborative economy companies have understood it better than others. Their customers know why they consume here and their employees know why they get up every morning. Defining the “why” and not just the “for what” of your company is the way to attract new talent, who particularly need this sense to mobilize, and ultimately to make your business desirable.

On the basis of these three principles, it now seems even more true to me to think of SME innovation in this context of a collaborative economy, because, in my opinion, innovation no longer has quite the same forms and characteristics. Even if the subject of innovation seems to have been largely explored, it seems necessary to return to an issue that is constantly being reinvented in companies, and mainly in our contemporary SMEs.

Gaëtan de SAINTE MARIE

Founding Manager of Qantis and PME Centrale