Jessen Marden: An example of creativity and entrepreneurship

President of the “Association Synergie Jeunes” and a young entrepreneur, Jessen Marden wants to promote entrepreneurship among the youth. With his ambition and hard work, he is all set to leave his footprint in the entrepreneurial world. He started a creative company which is already making inroads within the international market.

35-year old Jessen Marden is the director of Creatair – a creative entrepreneurship society commercialising in innovative products. By profession he is a designer, however, he does not limit his scope of work to this field of activities. He launched his own business to bring an innovative approach in terms of services provided to clients.

The Innovative Hub is based in Mauritius, which is a key business venture and strategic location for Indian Ocean and African countries business development. “Established in 2010, Creatair® is a brand that reflects creative innovation. Our Creatair product is conceived by a pool of talented experts in a specific fields with excellent skills in: project writing, market research, idea development, project implementation, research and development and standard verification. Having worked with international textile brands, I have to compete against foreign designers to create collections that buyers would like to have in their collections. I have seen that Mauritian innovation can compete with international developers, not only in textile but in other fields that require innovation, R&D and product development,” he says.

His customers are mainly corporate clients and organisations engaged in projects to promote their services and to optimise their business operations. “We present our product portfolio and each service is done with one young expert and marketed by a youth connection in countries.” 

The cost of innovation

According to Jessen, working on innovative projects requires loads of investment in terms of research and time. “In Mauritius, we lack some resources and expert assistance by organisations which support innovation, like they have in Europe. We have to roll out more incubators to support young entrepreneurs who have innovative concepts by providing them guidance on how to bring their innovative ideas to life. In Mauritius, we have have a lot of competent people across various areas such as sustainable design, ICT and technology development but without a proper platform, those persons will not be able to put their knowledge in action.”

His business has already made its way onto the international market. “We have started a project with the UK, India, Niger and other African countries and we worked on some design projects for the Global Power Shift organisation. We started marketing campaigns with our regional representatives and hopefully, in the future, we will be able to spread our innovative projects to other horizons. Our strategy is built around a simple step. Our regional representative looks for some creative needs in specific countries and try to build a creative project that caters for this need. A recent example is the digitalisation Niger’s education system.”

Synergie Jeunes

Established in 2013, “Synergie Jeunes” is a network of young entrepreneurs and experts in the Indian Ocean islands. It is a synergy of entrepreneurs, organisations and business institutions working together to facilitate the exchange of information to mutually support their communities. Jessen is the President of this Association which aims at promoting entrepreneurship among young people of the Indian Ocean. According to Jessen, young entrepreneurs are facing the same challenge, that is launching and growing their business. By working together and by exchanges, sharing and lobbying for tailor-made solutions, we will be able to forge ahead. The idea also is to identify how we can group businesses whereby each entrepreneur can supplement each other to build a business concept. Then, we thought that this should be extended to the region and broaden our scope as each island has its own business strength and expertise,” he says.