Inquirendi and Scalendi grew from the same curiosity: a desire to look beneath the surface, connect different perspectives and understand complex challenges in a different way.
Behind both initiatives is An Cosaert, whose journey spans R&D, innovation, entrepreneurship and intellectual property. Discover how that experience evolved into two distinct but mutually reinforcing ways of helping businesses move forward.
Curiosity, connecting seemingly unrelated ideas, and looking at complex challenges from a different perspective have been recurring themes throughout my career.
Inquirendi loosely translates as going on a journey of discovery. I did not choose that name by accident. An open mind and a strong appetite for learning have always shaped the way I work: asking questions, exploring new knowledge, making connections across disciplines and translating those insights into something companies can actually use.
I graduated as an industrial engineer in electromechanics, although graduating has always felt like a slightly strange concept to me. Learning never really stopped.
During fifteen years as an R&D engineer, I gained hands-on experience in materials research, electrical engineering, intellectual property and innovation management. More importantly, I learned that technology never exists in isolation. Its value ultimately depends on the problem it solves, the context in which it is applied and the possibilities it creates for the future.
From 2007 onwards, working as an innovation advisor within the network of Flemish Innovation Centres, I increasingly began connecting innovation, entrepreneurship and intellectual property.
A later period at Antwerp Management School, focusing on entrepreneurship in times of exponential change, further strengthened my interest in systems thinking, emerging technologies and the question of how companies can remain relevant while the world around them continues to evolve.
That journey eventually led to Inquirendi.
Through Inquirendi, I mainly work with R&D-driven companies.
I combine R&D, innovation strategy, business thinking and IP intelligence to look beyond what is being developed today and explore what that development could make possible tomorrow.
This led to my approach to Embedded IP Management.
Rather than considering intellectual property only when an innovation is ready for protection, I bring IP intelligence and strategic IP thinking much earlier into the R&D and innovation process.
As a Fractional IP Manager, I work at the interface between management, R&D teams and specialised external IP professionals.
Not to replace them, but to help ensure that business, innovation and IP decisions reinforce each other.
Explore before you protect. Understand before you decide.
Throughout this work, another question became increasingly important to me:
Why do some companies manage to grow beyond their first successful product, while others remain dependent on that product, their technology or their founders?
That exploration led to Scalendi in 2025.
With Scalendi Growth Logic, I work with founders to look beneath the visible product.
What really creates value?
What fundamental problem are they trying to solve?
What knowledge and capabilities are they building?
What can be repeated, extended or translated into other products, applications or markets?
And most importantly:
Are you scaling a product, or are you building a business that can scale?
Scalendi is gradually translating this way of thinking into accessible cases, frameworks, workshops and methodologies that help founders move from product-centred thinking towards scalable business thinking.
And I deliberately apply the same question to Scalendi itself.
My ambition is not to keep Scalendi dependent on my personal expertise. The challenge is to make my experience and way of thinking sufficiently explicit, understandable and transferable so that others can eventually apply and build upon it independently.
A methodology about scalability should ultimately be scalable itself.
I enjoy sharing these perspectives with founders, R&D teams, innovation professionals and organisations that are willing to challenge established ways of thinking.
I deliver keynotes and facilitate workshops in Dutch, English and French, from two clearly distinct perspectives.
For founders, accelerators, entrepreneurial ecosystems and entrepreneurship programmes.
Possible themes include:
For R&D- and innovation-driven organisations.
Possible themes include:
The context may be different, but my way of working remains remarkably consistent:
looking beneath the surface, making connections visible and translating complex insights into a direction people can actually work with.
As the author of Securing Your Business, I brought entrepreneurship, innovation and intellectual property together into a single business perspective.
Writing the book was much more than an exercise in collecting knowledge. It forced me to structure years of practical experience and make implicit thinking more explicit. That journey became an important step towards the thinking I am now developing further through Scalendi Growth Logic.
I am also a guest lecturer at Antwerp Management School, where I teach IP & Technologies of Tomorrow within the Master in Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
In addition, I mentor startups through imec.istart and participate in professional networks including BEPIUG, LES Benelux and I3PM.
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