Tesla comes to Luxembourg

It’s coming up to one year since Tesla opened its Luxembourg showroom. It was an exciting day for current owners, future owners and fans of the electric vehicle company in the region. The opening was made official by the Grand Duchy’s Deputy PM, Etienne Schneider, and Tesla Motor’s BE-LU Country Manager, An De Pauw. The EV company has topped Forbes’ 2016 list of the world’s most innovative companies, a commendation that can be attributed to teams of passionate employees and their CEO Elon Musk. Prior to the showroom opening, I attended the Digital Frontrunners talk hosted by Google Brussels where the importance of digitization was passionately emphasised by speakers from Singularity University, who spoke about AI, robotics, environmental challenges, innovation and exonomics (exponential economics). Digitization is set to influence our daily activities even more than before, making the following quote by Elon Musk stick with me:

“I could either watch it happen or be a part of it”

Digitizing Europe

Belgium was identified by Google and the Boston Consulting Group as one of the European Digital frontrunners, a group which also consists of Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Estonia and Ireland. The report carried out by the Boston Consulting Group on Digitizing Belgium really makes me feel like it is such an exciting time to be living between both Belgium and Luxembourg, while the Google Digital Frontrunners talk has, most likely, propelled many attendees to want to “be a part of it”. The Boston Consulting Group has highlighted five areas the should be focused on order to fully embody being a digitized nation:

• Enable digital and technology innovation
• Stimulate entrepreneurship
• Improve access to capital for young businesses
• Adopt and implement smart regulation for the future
• Build the skills and talent for tomorrow

(The Boston Consulting Group, 2016)

Entrepreneurship in Luxembourg

So where can you start? The digitization, start-up and entrepreneurship culture is without a doubt growing in Luxembourg and an excellent resource to keep up-to-date and draw inspiration from is Silicon Luxembourg. Find out where to pitch your next project and be a part of digitizing Luxembourg. WIDE (Women in Digital Empowerment) have also recently launched their startup leadership program for women, to better support women who are entrepreneurs in the digital and new tech industries.