We are launching l'Accélérateur Morning!
Who hasn’t spotted a Morning sign in Paris? With their 40 locations across the city, Morning is a leading coworking and office space operator in Paris.
We’ve been working together since 2020 and decided to team up for more systemic impact in the industry.
Together, we’re launching L’accélérateur, a program for 10 solutions to scale their impact faster. We sat down with Clément Alteresco, CEO and founder of Morning, to share a bit about the backstage and our hopes for the project. INTERVIEW 👇
Mawuena Tendar (Standard Deviation) - Having worked together for the past 3 years, we were convinced you should launch L’accélérateur, it was obvious to us. Looking at it from the outside, we can see the role you play in your sector, the influence you can have in the built environment's innovation ecosystem. What has decided you to take that step and be bolder in your impact strategy?
Clément Alterresco (Morning) - The main driver has been the opportunity to discover new climate-smart solutions that we can integrate in our supply chain. It will allow us to better deliver on our impact commitments, as the construction sites represent a significant part of our carbon footprint. We are already sourcing solutions to reduce our material impact but the Accelerator will allow us to go much faster.
MT - I thought you’d say that we were the ones who pushed you to be bolder!
CA - Haha - true. We chose you because we knew you would push us to be more ambitious.
MT - You will have great impact within the ecosystem, helping sustainable solutions scale faster. Marius Hamelot, founder of Le Pavé, with whom you already collaborated, told us “ Morning, its startup agility meets semi-industrial scale”. How do you see your role in a more systemic manner, beyond your four walls?
CA - We’re part of Nexity, who’s a partner of the program as well. Nexity is a leading real-estate promoter in France. Allowing a direct link between innovative solutions and Nexity operations, can be huge in terms of impact.
And yes, it’s true that Morning is a very startup friendly environment. We’re still relatively small, we’re 250 now, we work fast, we’re agile. We're good partners for startups. Our team is super committed to having a positive impact too, they are very motivated when it comes to improving our sustainability practices. Our design team is trained in eco-design, it’s in our DNA.
MT - The IPCC has warned us that we have 3 years left to change trajectory, we’ve experienced multiple climate disasters this summer, more and more people are awakening to the ecological urgency, even degrowth is now becoming a conversation topic in companies… How does it feel to be a leader of a company that is doing well?
CA - I stopped worrying about it : It’s with Morning that I can have the most impact, and I know our teams also expect us to take that responsibility. So we’re going full on. I don’t want to look back in 10 years and think we haven’t done our part. The biggest challenge is to find the right business equation, as we haven’t donated our shares to a non-profit, like others.
MT - What are your hopes for this launch, it’s a success if?
CA - The number of applicants is a good KPI, I think. If we have lots of applicants, it means that innovative companies see the program’s value. If we have 200 applications, look at 30 interesting candidates and accelerate 10 nuggets, I’ll be happy!
👉 Apply here!