About us

Early Stage is a Web consulting company based in Belgium and specialised in Strategy, Analysis and Support, with a specific focus on Enterprise 2.0 (Social Intranets and Extranets) and e-Gov 2.0.

Founded in 2008 by Laurent Kinet and Bart Van Den Kieboom, soon followed by Serge Fontinoy, Early Stage initially ambitioned to provide Preventive Consultancy services to organisations about to launch important Web projects. At this time we wrote the following text on our first blog:

We will help organisations not to make the mistakes we already have made during our own professional careers. Actually we should say: “not to make the mistakes we have already seen other organisations make over and over again”. After more than one decade of internet-project, account management and strategic consulting, we have had our share of successes but also, sometimes, a bittersweet taste in our mouths when certain projects ended that just didn’t fit in into the big strategic picture. Those experiences made us think: ‘Why did it go wrong? Where did it go wrong? What could we have done to prevent it?’ If there was a red line in the answers to all these question, it would be that if there was anything that had went wrong it was already going wrong from in the beginning. From the early stages on there were factors like the organisational environment, politics, budgets, change, vision, objectives and so many other things that were not taken into account. And once the project started it went steamrolling ahead until the wall was hit (hard).

We now still provide such services to our clients, but we added a few expertises to our portfolio: online collaborative platforms (Enterprise 2.0), e-government consulting, mobile business, and a strong layer of digital strategy that binds it all.

At Early Stage we are convinced that the whole business world is about to face a series of new fundamental challenges that go deep into the companies’ DNA and organisation. Our mission is to guide them through the fog, turning their traditional e-business masterpieces into genuine interconnected systems.

Since the Web 2.0 patterns have suddenly popped up, things have changed fast indeed – and these patterns have now stepped out of the ‘private-connected concern’ of one’s individual to spill out within companies and organisations – and whose side effects are already tangible.

We claim for an integrated relationship management ecosystem around an organisation, made of the convergence between Internet, Intranet, Extranet and other digital management tools. From a succession of independent, blind tools, we switch to integrated, reliable, connected, and collaborative ecosystems, leveraging the organisation’s business performance up to today’s standard requirements.

Early Stage’s mission is to guide its clients transforming from traditional e-business to Enterprise 2.0, by running audits, benchmark, business analysis and implementation support around existing and future programs and projects. We do not campaign for a technical or Copernican revolution. Methodologies and deliverables haven’t changed a lot: context has.

To achieve its mission, Early Stage provides pragmatic deliverables focussed on action: they are all and immediately exploitable within the projects’ sequence. The spine of our service offering lies in the very nature of consulting: with Strategy, we step in projects before they actually start, at their early stages, with Analysis, we ensure that the delivered product is compliant with the internal and external stakes and parameters, and with Support, we help organisations to efficiently deliver results and experience the whole program as smoothly as possible.

Early Stage has signed the eTic Charter under the ref. 380.