On 22 September 2026, the business community of Burgundy-Franche-Comté gathered at L’Écrin in Talant, next to Dijon, for CONNECT 2026. For the first time, La French Tech Bourgogne-Franche-Comté and the region’s major business networks joined forces in a single show, under the tagline “Innovation, technologies and economic transformations”.
Quiet Quotient was there. This is our report from the day: what the show was, who we spoke with, and what it means for any company that wants to know what its customers really think.
A new format for the region
The show brought together start-ups looking for funding, business leaders working out what AI means for their companies, and recruiters looking for talent. According to regional press, the aim was to break down the barriers between sectors and speed up the region’s competitiveness.
On the floor, themed areas covered deeptech, cybersecurity, and skills, recruitment and training, next to a business meetings area. Talks ran in the auditorium and on a stage in the exhibition hall.
What we did there
We came to meet the people who build and run companies in our own region, and to explain what we do in plain words.
Most of our conversations were with founders, managers and business owners whose work sits far from research. Some sat surprisingly close to it, and a few ran much longer than planned.
Between conversations, we sat in on two panels in the auditorium. The first, at 11:20, asked “Du labo au marché : vendre avant de lever, la vraie preuve de marché ?” (From lab to market: is selling before you raise the real proof of market?). The second, at 12:00, was titled “Le bon financement : grandir sans perdre le contrôle” (The right financing: growing without losing control). We also caught a talk on the exhibition floor called “Technologies quantiques : de quoi parle-t-on ?” (Quantum technologies: what are we talking about?), whose slide split the field into three families: computers, communications and sensors.
What "proof of market" misses
The first panel’s question is one every young company faces. Selling before you raise is strong proof that someone will pay. It doesn’t tell you why they pay, who hesitated, or what people say about you when you are not in the room. Sales count the customers who said yes. They can’t count the ones who looked, said nothing and left.
Reviews and comments don’t fill that gap, because they only show the people who choose to post. Many customers have stopped posting in public but still talk about brands elsewhere: in private groups, forums and with friends. That gap is what Quiet Quotient works on, and it matters as much to a regional company as to a national brand.
Five plain questions for a young company
Our method works in five passes. For a company testing its market, they turn into five questions:
- Surface: What are people saying about your product, or your category, when nobody asked them?
- Identity: Who do they say they are when they say it? The same opinion means something different depending on the identity someone is defending.
- Tension: What is really driving the opinion, underneath the reason given?
- Absence: What is nobody saying, and why? Silence is data.
- Leverage: What can your team do about it this quarter?
You can see the method at work in our case study Nobody Ordered Grape Juice, where 146 YouTube comments about alcohol-free wine showed how loud mockery can hide quiet demand.
Where to start
Were you at CONNECT and we didn’t get to talk? Our starting point is the Cultural Signal Check: a fixed-scope, fixed-price diagnostic that applies the method to real, existing online conversation about your category or brand. It is a fast, sharp read before you commit to a full research programme. If that sounds useful, let’s talk.
Also this week: Le Printemps des Études 2026, Paris: our field report
About Quiet Quotient: We are a research consultancy based in Dijon. We study what customers say when nobody is asking, and what they leave out, and turn it into decisions a team can act on.
