The baptismal name of the company, necessarily attached to the English, would tend to plunge the neophyte into the abyss of the “start-up” economy of the XXI.e , to leave him amazed, at first glance: Advanced Experience Technologies. And then there is the way to one of his parents, Christian Bastien , to play down all that… “You are going to take the plane and you want to know if your luggage will be with you or in the hold. The airlines tell you about it on their website. Hey! well, at AET, we will tell you if the site of a given company is much better than that of another, if the customer finds it easily, if he has his question answered quickly or if he is struggling. And offer a diagnosis to improve all that ”
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Three brains at work
And that’s how, from a rather simple idea, or a disastrous experience, we create a start-up in February which is already a hit in December of the same year. “For now, our customers are big. They all want to improve the ergonomics of the tools they make available to the public and their customers. ”Christian Bastien is a research professor at the ‘University of Lorraine , in Saulcy, in Metz. Director of the Perseus laboratory, he worked on the concept of AET with two other of his former doctoral students.
Several years of grinding computer programs before the small start-up saw the light of day. He is rather proud of the result, of the road traveled. “Here, we have developed a real tool that allows any site owner to make it efficient. AET allows users to work remotely while we study their behavior in the search for information. The time spent visiting a page, searching, etc. With everything we collect, we rectify a site “
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70% survival rate
€ 30,000 were given to researchers at the Perseus lab to help them get their project out of the bud. A grant from the Lorraine Region. But not that… For all that is assembly of the company, it is the Lorraine incubator , the association of the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, (created by the University of Lorraine, the CNRS, Inra, Inria, Inserm, the Regional University Hospital Center of Nancy and the regional council), which stuck to it. “The business plan, the licenses, the Incubator took care of everything. It’s essential, ”explains Christian Bastien. “This aspect of a company creation is very heavy and requires expertise”
Twenty candles are to be blown on the incubator’s cake today. “We set up 18 projects each year, approximately”, explains its director, Natacha Hauser Costa. “All this very often comes out of the laboratories that we encourage to create. »174 projects have been supported over these two decades. Fifteen start-ups were born and are still alive. The survival rate of companies is announced at 70%. A license buyout could soon continue the good story of AET.
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