hi,

We are Steve and Nathalie, the founders of Heirloom Labs. 

We both come from different professional backgrounds, different generations, and different regions.
While Nathalie has always been an entrepreneur, Steve has been stimulating entrepreneurship in academia for 15 years.
Nathalie wanted to pass on her years of experience to the next generation, and Steve wanted to scale up what he was doing within one university to a broader level. We shared our ambition with several people until, one day, someone said: “You two need to talk. 

That person was right: Heirloom Labs was born.

The added value of having complementary expertise quickly became clear. At the same time, we found some interesting common grounds:

• We both share a passion for young entrepreneurship, where young stands for “early / fresh / new”.

• We look at people in the same way, which means our values and norms are on the same wavelength.

• We strongly believe in the importance of building long-term qualitive relationships .

• We are both convinced that Europe urgently needs more innovation and that it may no longer waste time in activating its research potential and -talent.

And above all: we believe the time is now to stop keeping researchers at arm’s length from the market and instead fully empower them to convert their talent and impact potential into actual innovation, through real entrepreneurship.

The way we, as co-founders, were matched, how we express the importance of values and norms between individuals, how we care about ethics, sustainability, integrity, personal approach, and quality, and how eager we are to have more entrepreneurship, all of that is 100% embedded in the DNA of Heirloom Labs. This is simply who we are and what we do.

We believe entrepreneurship grounded in these values is exactly the missing link Europe needs: the place where research and the market finally meet.
Not as opposites, but as a catalytic match. A match that can ignite real innovation in the real world.

We genuinely believe that by creating this ‘living labs’ environment, we can trigger many researchers to feel permission, energy and appetite to take this step.Not because “they should”, but because they finally see that their science can become heirloom or heritage for future generations to come, without losing themselves, their ethics, or their identity as researchers.

That is the wind we want to bring.
That is the spark we want to help ignite.

We hope to share this perspective with many researchers and help them see its value.

Warm wishes,
Steve and Nathalie