Francois is a business expert with over 25 years of track record in entrepreneurship and innovation. In 2015, he founded Innobator in Hong Kong and Shanghai with 5 other partners from Hong Kong to provide incubation for start-ups and young entrepreneurs targeting Mainland China market. He worked with more than 200 start-up projects in the first 18 months and set a record to raise Angel Funding for one of them in 44 days.
A group of start-ups from Shanghai were brought to Entrepreneur Day, organised by Hong Kong Trade Development Council (HKTDC), in May 2016 to facilitate communications between start-ups from Shanghai and Hong Kong. In 2016, Innobator also organised B4B Challenge, a 4-month competition focusing on Big Data innovation, aimed at promoting the development of Big Data business applications in Hong Kong. B4B Challenge was organised by Innobator, co-organised by Cyberport and sponsored and supported by 30+ corporates, universities and associations as well as 40+ industry leaders. Corporate sponsors include Fung Group, Hitachi, Hong Kong Airlines, MoneySQ, New World Development, Prudential, Towngas Telecom and Value Partners etc. Through B4B Challenge, Innobator, Cyberport, sponsors and supporters would like to provide a platform that connects Big Data demand (innovative information solutions) and supply (talents in Hong Kong) to accelerate pervasive Big Data adoption and improve maturity as the foundation for Hong Kong to become a reliable, high-quality and sustainable source of digital innovations in the Asia-Pacific region.
In 2003, Francois built his corporate consultancy business in Shanghai serving international clients including Cornes (Japan), Cosway (Malaysia), DermaLab (Swiss), Knight Frank (Europe) and Weight Watchers (USA). He joined an online real-time ticketing agent start-up in 2009, Travelzen, as the corporate advisor and built a strong travel agents network with 20,000 databases within China and managed 100 sales personnel with 7 regional offices across the nation in 24 months. He established Touchbase Travel Logistics to actualize his Online to On Ground (O2O) perception towards the gap between online automated system and traditional travel logistics services in a new dimension and acquired Miss Universe China (July 2011) and Sapphire Now Beijing (Nov 2011) as event clients by providing housing and airfare services to more than 14,000 attendees.
