Scaleup Vlaanderen
Stellar Labs
How do you know if workplace training is successful? It's a question many managers struggle with - and one that Scaleup Flanders alumnus Stellar Labs has the answer to.
In a consulting firm, relevant knowledge is the beginning of everything. Just ask Raf Seymus, who founded Exellys in 2014 and was the company's CEO for many years. 'We were steaming highly skilled IT professionals ready for the work field. So giving those talented people the necessary training is very important. The costs for this were significant. In itself that is not a bad thing because you are investing in your company, but the difficult thing is that there was no objective way to measure success. I looked for solutions to do that, but found nothing," Raf says.
During that search, he began reading books about how people learn and capture information. One such book is "Neuroscience for learning and development" by British learning expert Stellar Collins. 'I was so enthusiastic about her vision, in that I necessarily wanted to talk to her. She could help us as a consultant. Together we developed a hybrid learning methodology that ensured we could move smoothly from knowledge to skills on the job.'
Wanting to scientifically validate their findings, the duo headed to the University of Antwerp. There they were able to conduct further research on another question Raf and Stella were grappling with: which data points will you use to capture data in order to validate the learning process and positively influence the learning process while it is in progress?
The two decided to start a company together that initially focused on services. For example, Stellar Labs developed learning paths and did L&D audits. 'In the early years we used a Dutch platform, but that was not sufficient in terms of data. We could not get all the data we would like, and in addition, the architecture of that software was not adapted to the data age.'
Stellar Labs faced a difficult choice. It wanted to bet more on its own platform in order to use their own product to best support the learning process within organizations and automate it whenever possible. The scaleup wanted to make the switch to a scalable product company, but didn't know how. Either it had to develop its own platform or adopt and adapt an existing (open-source) platform.
What did they have to do? It's a question they posed to the experts at Scaleup Flanders during the group coaching sessions. 'Stellar Labs is a bit of an atypical company for those sessions, as it had neither a product-market fit nor investment with their new positioning. The concept was there, but technically there was still a long way to go to be able to run a platform itself,' says Frederik Tibau of Scaleup Flanders.
Together with the experts, a solution was sought and found. Onsophic, a scaleup operating in the same sector, was in the process of repositioning itself. They were about to divest the learning aspect of their business in order to focus more on facilitating change in companies. Specifically, this meant that Onsophic would no longer use some of its technology,' Frederik says.
A godsend for Raf and Stella, who after an introduction by the team at Scaleup Flanders managed to acquire some of those assets. 'Their Learning Experience Platform and Data Engine will help us to easily launch learning processes and monitor and capture all activities. About 70% of what we need is already in Onsophic, but obviously we need to adapt the whole front-end and UX," it sounds.
Raf: "Above all, we gained a lot of time through that acquisition. Roughly speaking, we now have a head start of one and a half years, as well as a lot of knowledge about pitfalls to avoid. The code of the technology we acquired is very solid. This was also evident from the technical due diligence and gap analysis that PENCIL42 performed. Without Scaleup Flanders, I think we would never have arrived at this solution, or at least not so quickly.'
Now the main issue is to continue developing the platform. 'We want to market a product that does what we want it to do. That is why we are looking for additional investment of one million. We have already sold a number of pilot projects and are now with a team of almost ten people. We are building our engineering team, interested developers are always welcome!" says Raf.
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