Little known to the general public but an essential ally for innovation, FUTUREWAVE helps companies navigate the path to the future while taking a clear-eyed look at Brussels’ HealthTech sector.
When it comes to innovation, having a good idea is not enough. It must also be made desirable, feasible and viable. To help ambitious and visionary concepts become reality, there are agencies whose ambition is to combine industrial design and technology to bring even the boldest dreams to life.
Among them is the design and engineering studio FUTUREWAVE, which for the past six years has combined the artistic flair of industrial designers with the Cartesian rigour of engineers.
At the service of the future of businesses
“Our mission is to advise our clients — or, rather, our partners — on broad, high-level innovation challenges,” explains Cédric de Bellefroid, co-founder and CEO of FUTUREWAVE. “We help them anticipate the future of their products by combining creativity, technical feasibility and viability. We study how their customer base and its needs are evolving, as well as emerging technologies, and define possible scenarios.”
FUTUREWAVE is also increasingly approached by startups seeking help and support to concretely develop new products conceived internally. “We structure the idea and imagine the product, both in terms of design and technological architecture and the various components,” explains the CEO. “We develop the product roadmap, build prototypes, and then look for the best possible partners — the most experienced ones — to industrialise the product, in other words, make it feasible to produce 10,000 or even 100,000 units. Initially, we provided 100% of the service in-house, but since the emergence of AI around three years ago, we have increasingly positioned ourselves as architects: we design the preliminary concept and build the mock-up, then oversee the project, somewhat like a construction supervisor.”
A strong focus on medical and healthcare
FUTUREWAVE supports brands of all sizes, primarily in four sectors that are particularly conducive to innovation: mobility and automotive, wearable objects — including medical and healthcare applications — smart home technology, and cultural and marketing activations.
“Medical and healthcare quickly became a strategic focus for FUTUREWAVE,” says Cédric de Bellefroid. “It is an important sector in Belgium, where there were, until recently, significant budgets available, encouraging many companies to develop new projects. For our part, we mainly focus on healthcare, which does not require the highly demanding ISO 13485 certification. We recently contributed to the development of an ‘intelligent’ call button for healthcare staff in nursing homes. In the medical field, we limit ourselves to the role of industrial designer, and we excel at making products user-friendly. We leave the technological side to specialists.”
The essential role of the lifetech cluster
Although 50 to 70% of the projects handled by FUTUREWAVE in this sector involve international projects, Cédric de Bellefroid and his team are well acquainted with Brussels’ HealthTech ecosystem, and more specifically with the lifetech cluster of hub.brussels, with which FUTUREWAVE is in contact several times a year for specific questions or on the occasion of various events.
“I greatly appreciate the work of this cluster and its Medtech Accelerator,” he emphasises. “Nowhere else in Belgium is there an organisation as dynamic and effective as the lifetech cluster when it comes to supporting the early stages of a project and putting so many initiatives in place to support its members. In Brussels, I believe it is one of the only clusters working in this way. The projects that emerge thanks to it are therefore, for the most part, very interesting.”
This keen observer of innovation has one wish: “In a sector where the budgets required to reach the market are so substantial and the time to market so long, project financing is extremely complex. Public support is therefore desirable, and this is probably an area in which Brussels should make an effort to keep its promising companies within the region. Because the capital and, more broadly, Belgium have a strong card to play: while Belgium may generally appear as a small player when it comes to innovation funding, in the medical, pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, we are a heavyweight thanks to the presence of several major companies on our territory,” concludes Cédric de Bellefroid.
