About Forward Partners
Forward is a person, not a firm.
Forward Partners is a Paris-based innovation consulting and training practice founded and run by Franck Debane. It helps product, engineering and marketing teams in large industrial groups launch products their customers buy. Forward takes on four to six engagements a year, and Franck sits in the customer interviews himself.
- Training
- Engineer, ESIEA (computer science, electronics, AI)
- First career
- 15 years in international tech: Silicon Valley, Yahoo!, AOL Europe, BBC.com, Criteo
- Since 2012
- Founder of Forward Partners, 45+ engagements with large companies
- Teaching
- Entrepreneurship and innovation at EDHEC and Université Paris Dauphine
- Community
- Founder of the Lean Startup Circle Paris, host of Lead Innovation Day
Why Forward exists
Franck is an engineer. He spent the first half of his career inside tech companies, from Silicon Valley to Yahoo!, AOL Europe, BBC.com and Criteo, watching good products die because no one talked to a customer until launch. In 2012 he moved to entrepreneurship and built Forward to fix that.
The method is customer pull: talk to customers first, test the risky bets with real prospects, kill what nobody pulls and build what survives. Forward installs it inside the client's own team, on a live launch, and the engagement has succeeded when the team can run the playbook again without Forward.
Teams Forward has worked with include Renault, Schneider Electric, Nissan, Belden, Butagaz, Engie, Framatome, Groupe Atlantic. See the case studies, the engagement and the training programmes.
Elsewhere
- debane.org: Franck's blog, guides and the podcast episodes
- LinkedIn: Franck's profile
- Perspectives: articles and the Architects of Change podcast
Want to talk to Franck?
A 30-minute call is enough to tell whether Forward can help your next launch.
Book a 30-min discovery call