GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Forget About Innovation Washing

Focused on the best ways to take advantage of communications to innovate, Inès Dartiguenave‘s expertise stems from her simultaneous work for communications consultancy Opinion Valley and photo start-up Wipplay, and from her graduation at Sorbonne University (CELSA). Given the importance of the international dimension of communications and innovation, she now plans to tour the best places dedicated to innovation around the world.

In this post, she examines 3 steps where communication and innovation can substantially benefit from each other.

Many thanks to Nicolas Bry who offered me the opportunity to express my ideas on his blog! I met him as part of my graduate essay about “the value of communication in innovation: the delicate equilibrium between change management and innovation washing”. Here is the vision I developed after this inspiring meeting.

Communication, marketing and innovation: an explosive cocktail for a powerful brand!

Communication is a big deal in innovation, to foster the project as it takes shape but also to give meaning to the brand’s new value proposition.

A global approach is necessary to accelerate innovation in the targeted market. Therein lies the difference between an invention kept in a laboratory and an innovation adopted by consumers.

Since the process of acceptation and diffusion is essential to any new project, here are three fundamental steps to support rapid innovation:

• Communication as a way to test the coherence between the brand and the innovation;
• Communication as an essential asset to develop innovation;
• Communication as a tool to spread innovation.

Working on key messages for the brand tackles deep questions of DNA and brand positioning. When all the messages make sense with the brand’s core mission, the external communication can responsively be deployed.

1) Communication as a way to test the coherence between the innovation and the brand

The main mission of communication is building a brand identity, strong enough to establish legitimacy on a given territory.

It means the brand has to reconsider its core mission and what their customers are expecting. Innovation must be fundamentally related to the purpose of the brand.

Simon Sinek’s book “Start with why” is very accurate to better explore innovation. To deeply engage its audience and its customers, he insists on the direct presentation of the brand’s core mission, even before exposing the brand identity and its products. When one begins with the core value proposition, the following proposition should directly link to it.

If you want to see by yourself the pertinence of this approach for a powerful and meaningful brand, here is the TED talk: “how great leaders inspire action”.

With this special focus on the Why, communication appears as a way to question and validate the accuracy of the new idea for the brand and the market.

Does the brand want to follow their competitors or does it want to be sure its new proposition is answering the market needs and capitalizing on its own expertise?

For instance, this year IKEA Singapore chose to reverse the expectations for its future catalogue. They presented the paper version as an innovative way to develop the user experience, better than with an online application. Here is this funny and instructive advertisement called “The power of the book”.

IKEA detects emerging signals and plays with the implicit rules of innovation to develop new business opportunities, in line with its strong values.

As Nicolas Bry told me: “Never deny your brand. Innovation is not the negation of the past. It develops itself in coherence with the brand and aims at creating a pertinent proposition in a specific territory.”

2) Communication as an essential asset to develop innovation

Coherence is fundamental, because at first, there is just an idea and the project manager. The whole innovation process will depend on the level of engagement and acceptance the project is able to carry out.

When a new idea comes up, the first challenge is related to conviction. The project manager has to find partners to implement its idea. To succeed rapidly in this process, he or she needs strong, clear communication.

For an entrepreneur, this exercise corresponds to the pitch. To build a powerful key message, the idea has to be relevant for a specific market. Is it solving a problem, adding value or filling an empty segment? In a few words, the entrepreneur needs to get support from various stakeholders.

It is the same inside a company. Each new idea waiting for implementation reveals questions of organization, time and often money. So, the whole deal is about convincing people, bringing new talents, finding partners and raising funds for the project. Communication helps bringing the project to reality, thanks to a large union around the endorsed problem.

To foster the new project, look quickly for a metaphor to help the immediate comprehension of the innovative project. The more disruptive the project is, the more difficult it is to expose the concept. The metaphor directly facilitates a common comprehension.

Finally, communication constitutes a powerful way to design the innovative idea, and federate the stakeholders required for its implementation.

3) Communication as a tool to spread innovation

Actually, innovation is about consolidation. Idea execution occurs when the new value proposition meets its first customers and finds its market.

The path of innovation is carried out by communication and marketing which foster the adoption of the new product. If at the beginning, the brand wants to interest and engage clients or customers, the big challenge is to find “early adopters” or people who are willing to experiment with the new product or service.

There is a real gap between interest and adoption. So it’s good to start with blog reviews, but the success lies in the product use. Although the new product might initially elicit media interest, the innovation accomplishment depends on independent use, and the product qualities, all of which have been developed in coherence with the brand.

Inès Dartiguenave @Ines_drt

Credits: cocktails_withbarristab, Simon Sinek, pitch Esnspiral, crossing-the-chasm G Moore

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

An Interview with Orly Lobel

Orly Lobel is the author of “Talent Wants to Be Free” and a professor of Law at University of San Diego (Don Weckstein Professor of Employment and Labor Law). She has received high praise for her book, including coverage from The Economist and BusinessWeek in the US, and she kindly answers hereafter a few questions about talents management.

1) N Bry: Hi Orly, tell us a little bit about yourself: you’re an international expert in the law and economics of human capital, how did you come to champion in this discipline?

Orly Obel: There is actually, as always, a personal story behind my academic and scholarly interest in researching the field. I grew up in Israel and before becoming an attorney I served as an intelligence commander in the military. So the truth is, my first career was all about understanding and internalizing the significance of secrecy and confidentiality.

And yet, in Talent Wants to Be Free I argue that we have to be smart about what we keep secret, what we control and fence, the type of knowledge and information that becomes proprietary, and we need to understand the value of sharing the rest and creating competitive markets over talent.

After law school I clerked on the Israel Supreme Court, and we were examining the ways in which Israel can enhance its position as a start-up nation. We looked at Silicon Valley as a model and to our surprise Silicon Valley encouraged talent wars and had a strong policy and strong norms against controlling the mobility of knowledge workers. Then when I was a researcher at Harvard Law School, I saw up close the difference between California’s approach that made Silicon Valley what it is and Massachusett’s approach which hindered mobility and entrepreneurship by strongly enforcing non-compete agreements and allowing employers to fence up their talent.

Finally, I moved to California and this job hopping and regional hopping has helped me study the best strategies that industry leaders and top innovators compete.

2) You recently published ‘Talent wants to be free’, which gets a lot of positive reviews, and has won prestigious awards: would sum it up by saying that it ‘uncovers the ingredients to triumph in the innovative ecosystem, leveraging the best people, and that it suggests steps to build success in the talent war’?

Is it true that one of its learning highlights that ‘too much control of talent is counterproductive, by preventing the freedom and flow of knowledge that is so critical to innovation’?

Yes, that’s a good elevator pitch for Talent Wants to Be Free! I set out to challenge conventional wisdom that businesses need to prevent the loss of their information and best people in order to win the innovation wars.

To the contrary, you can turn loss into strength, you can use your “alums” as recruitment ambassadors, as partners in the industry, you can use their own success to your advantage, and you can build on information sharing to create fruitful collaborations.

3) ‘Talent wants to be free’ suggests a new model to replace protectionist mentality, and states that ‘motivation, relationships, and mobility’ are most important ingredients for successful innovation, and mastering talents: can you elaborate a little on these 3 factors?

My research is at the intersections of behavioral economics and business policy. Along with collaborators we’ve found that the best way to motivate talented people to contribute to your venture is to give them a stake in what they are doing, a sense that they are not just widgets stripped from their own identity. People care about their product and want to know that their career trajectory is looking up while they are performing strongly in the market.

Relationships are so important because it is through direct contact and networks that industries move forward more rapidly. The most significant  knowledge exchanges come from face-to-face interactions, even as we are moving to a global economy.

That’s why mobility too is an ingredient for innovation. A healthy region has a lot of mobility because it means that there is real competition over the best minds, that companies are flexible and adjusting to changing needs rapidly, that recruitment is based on new challenges and ventures, and fresh blood is constantly poured into teams, such that they keep fresh rather than stagnating.

4) Reading your writing, I was thinking of of Michel Fiol sentence: “Natural leadership is not power based management but the capacity to develop autonomy of the team members and to create co-leaders.” Would you feel on the same line?

I think Fiol has a lot of insight here: the knowledge economy is based on creating thinkers and self-driven individuals, not top down controls. The best minds in today’s markets are not just looking for a monthly salary or a long-term secure comfortable position. They are looking to be challenged, to be part of something bigger and meaningful and they are looking for an environment that will allow them to continuously learn and contribute.

4) The platform for rapid innovation, is based on four principles.

• First principle is to give autonomy to the innovation team, assuming autonomy is the mother of motivation and creativity.
• Second principle, is about ‘creative tension’: considering that fuzziness does not help the innovation team, we suggest company’s leader should commit to set-up stretched goals, and then let the team lead the team in a start-up mode, progressing collectively.
• Third principle is strategic alignment: being different does not mean being separate, innovation team needs alignment with the core, involving a shared innovation portfolio, and nurturing a network of innovation peers and relationships;
• finally, fourth principle is modular design: to facilitate cooperation, let’s design modules and deliver API that will let others create value on top of your platform.

Interestingly I find the words motivation and relationship are part both of your model and of the rapid innovation platform. What is your opinion on this framework, and how does it match with motivation, relationships, and mobility factors you stress on?

I like this framework because it understands the process of innovation as both relational and dynamic. A lot of today’s innovation is based on enhancing the environment to pick up on opportunities as they come. It isn’t enough to have the best ideas or past successes, you need to have the right set up to capture changing realities. A company needs to be agile and as such, it has to think about how teams learn, adjust, react.

I think that the ideas of autonomy and motivation are very related. People have to be motivated and committed in order to self-direct.

The ideas of relationships are all about the structure and design of the networks and ties of one’s team and alliances – both internal and external.

5) More globally, how do you believe the human factor impact company’s innovation potential, amongst other factors such as its business strategy, organization & process & tools, innovation culture, brand capital, customer base?

All of these factors are important but surprisingly, the human factor is often both the most important and the least understood in today’s markets. Surveys of CEOs of top companies around the world consistently show that the human dimension, how to motivate, incentive, recruit, retain, evaluate, and best utilize, is the most pressing challenge of businesses today.

Talent Wants to Be Free aims to help us think more strategically about the human dimension, combining both research and illuminating stories of successes and failures of some of the most fascinating companies in every industry.

Credits: brand-control, informationsecuritybuzz.com, beapart-calstatela-edu, tweakyourbiz.com, innovategov.org

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Radical and outstanding innovations was the focus of the 7th  National Meeting of Innovation Directors hold in Paris last June.

The summit split into two parts, the Hermes award winners ceremony, and a series of thematic panels and lectures.

Thematic panels

My friend Yann Cramer and I had the chance to moderate thematic sessions. They are the opportunity to listen to brief presentations, followed by a debate between panelists. Below are a few take-aways.

Health, Fitness, Beauty, and Well-being

• Taking temperature without contact with an optical point, and reading it on the wall or on the forehead of your child, is now possible with Tecnimed;

• Makeup Genius by Loreal is a mobile app, a make-up simulator to test make-up products on your face with your mobile phone;

Some insights from the panel:

• ‘For an innovation to work, it requires meaning; innovation needs time to incubate, it nurtures in an environment of goodwill;’
• ‘One shall not remain stubborn, and know when put things on hold: an idea can make a come back 20 years later, some ideas are persistent!’
• ‘Innovation doesn’t fit into boxes: we did not limit ourselves, and they thought we were crazy.’

Handicap and dependance

• Essilor holds innovation in its DNA thanks to 25% of his employees being shareholders, and a strong policy of partnership (over 200 since 2005). It focuses now on low cost glasses at $2, and wishes to address a 50 millions people market;
• Tobii provides an eye tracker for every device;
• With Nao, Aldebarran designs a cute robot which wants to be accepted by human beings, ‘for what it is more than for what it does’. It interacts with voice and eyes, and initiates an emotional relationship. Aldebarran has created a specific Ask Nao line for autism, and also works on embedded robotics in cars.

Education, culture, and knowledge

• Share my lesson believes tablet is a fabulous opportunity for teaching: ‘we are digital, always open, we plan to build upon tablets, it’s non conflict at all, even more, 100% complementary. Tablets are an incredibly disruptive tech for the class room, to meet the children with a collaborative tool, design adaptative learning, put every kid in front of the tablet and feed where they are, and move at various spaces’;
• Senai adds a comment: ‘let’s not give all the responsabilities to digital, we’ll always need the touch of the machine’.

Industry, systemes, and networks

• SolideXpress opens a new era of 3D manufacturing, printing bricks for houses, 50% lighter, prosthesis that can be frequently replaced, unbelievable parts in sugar or chocolate or without shape, for nano tech, and via biomimetism.
• Fives brings flexibility in manufacturing: by enabling instant-settings in the manufacturing line, it delivers mass-customisation. Factories are heading toward smaller sites, producing sophisticated and lighter materials, and getting smart (connected factories) for maintenance, and quality monitoring;
• BA Systemes is a leader in automated handling and storage, and especially Automated Guided Vehicles, and a pioneer in open innovation since 2007. It has recently designed a robot able to drill 11000 holes for a swimming pool, a robot used in radiography, a Cobot (Mobile Collaborative Service Robots), and a robot for reeducation;
• Enovasense measures thickness without any contact, through laser and infrared sensor: no more probe whose contact with a part can spoil it, Enovasense heats up the workpiece with laser, and detects the thermal flow, brilliant! Applications in the industry are endless;

[vimeo=https://vimeo.com/100647155]

• Sigfox is the low-cost operator for Internet of Things: below 1 yearly euro to connect your object, and soon without battery, with self-powered objects through future Sigfox radio chips; at the opposite of high throughput, Sigfox promotes low bandwidth for electricity meters, alarms, tensiometers, glucometers, city sensors, in a frugal innovation move. Sigfox uses a radio network with antennas covering dozen of kilometers, so you can bring your connected object with you within this surface.
• PSA Head of Research and Advanced Engineering Jean-Marc Finot presents an Hybrid Air car, on the path toward fuel consumption of 2 l/100 km, which is the amazing result of a fast-track entrepreneurial innovation process: a small team with a commando state of mind, acting in a start-up mode, with a sense of urgency and a feeling of pride;

• We were bluffed by Patrice Reilhac, Innovation & Collaborative Research director at Valeo, presenting the car that parks itself in; intuitive driving combines connected car,  embedded sensors, cameras and a laser scanner, with partial automation, and offers you a valet in your pocket: the car can even get out of its parking place to fetch you.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5eK1dCuSk4]

Food and Agriculture

• Terrena, is a new type of agriculture: the ‘watchkeepers of the earth’ as they call themselves, are testers who experiment, infocasters who spread and convince, passionates who talk to consumers, and share their love for ‘their’ agriculture. It entices accuracy (the unit is a parcel, sowing is precise to 1 cm to do without weedkillers), and several technologies to coinnovate to map the soil, use SMS to monitor fungal disease, or measure himidity and physcal stress with probes;
• PAT is a companys which seems coming out Encounters of the Third Kind: it develops carnivorous plants which produce rare compounds like liquid proteins similar to human genes;

City life and Public services

• 27eme region is headed by Stephane Vincent. It is an amazing task force which impulses, and coaches innovations in the public sector. Public sector is adopting modern innovation methods, like immersion (among users), observation, participation, design, and prototypage. 27eme region supports various kind of challenges: 1) re-thinking a regional policy within 5 days, helping public servants to redesign their organization; 2) connecting high-schools to digital, more than a new equipment, revisiting behaviours with ‘inverse class’ (students viewing lesson on video at home, and raising questions at school), and Q&A or QCM executed on mobile handsets; 3) simplifying social administrative request from a user point of view, and testing the new process with 2000 people; 4) imagining himself in the shoes of a start-up, and retracing the entrepreneurial path in the administration labyrinth.

Related post (1/1)

image credits : Pierre Metivier RNDI Album,

Radical and outstanding innovations was the focus of the 7th National Meeting of Innovation Directors hold in Paris last June.

‘Radical innovations mark a new era linked to performance far greater than at previous times. They are unusual, hence their “extraordinary” dimension. They appear at the end of a great wave of innovations, after the purely scientific and technical phase.’ explains master of ceremony Marc Giget.

Radical and extraordinary also involve social: are there access to key services (health, education, travel, housing, fulfilling jobs….) for those people who have in the past always been excluded? The 7th National meeting of chief Innovation Officers explores the world of innovations which improve life in an extraordinary way.’

The summit split into two parts, the Hermes award winners ceremony, and a series of thematic panels and lectures.

Hermes Award Ceremony

1. Haier

Haier is headed by his CEO, Zhang Ruilin, toward user-centric innovation for consumer electronics and home appliances: he set-up the washing machine that one can visit! Innovation starts from people’s needs, Haier believes in grassroot innovation, or inverted pyramid where innovation moves bottom-up. Haier runs user-centric platforms for design (‘690 platform’), a network of innovators for R&D, and develops social initiatives (Hope project for education : “sincerely giving back to society”);

2 Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer Institutes are bridging the gap between research institutes and industry & startups in Germany with a network of 67 institutes and research units.

3 Interface

Interface is an ‘all green’ leader, aiming at ‘mission Zero’:

• Interface is the inventor of carpet tile which provides flexibility, and lets you reorganize space over time;
• Its French factory manufactures 13 m2 of carpet tile module per hour, with a fully carbon-neutral footprint:
• Carpet raw material represents 65% of the polluting impact; therefore Interface uses vegetal fiber, and carpet standard set-up is performed without any glue;
• Interface commits to coinnovation to invent future solutions, with new technologies, and develops networks to refine supply chain and build inclusive business.

4 Sharemylesson

Sharemylesson is a sharing platform for teaching resources, designed by, and for professors. It comes near 300 000 online resources, and 3 m teachers are using it: “they want to improve their teaching, be helped to be more effective in their classroom with their students. Suppport is based on what students need, many resources are explicitely for students, for example practice sheets for students. Creativity comes from the teachers. It covers all grade levels. Peer review makes best supports emerge. The resources are owned by the teachers, they get credit, and they have followers. Sharemylesson does not sell, it is public domain: we do not control who uses it. Freedom of speech. Free to share to any teacher”.

5 Rewalk, Argo’s exoskelet

Rewalk is an exskeleton technology that aims at making the user independant. It’s globally easy to use, you just click and start to walk: “ReWalk controls movement using subtle changes in center of gravity, mimics the natural gait pattern of the legs, and provides functional walking speed. A forward tilt of the upper body is sensed by the system, which triggers the first step”.

We had a very impressive and moving demo on stage.

Paralysed athlete Claire Lomas finished the London Marathon in her bionic Rewalk suit, 16 days after she set off.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xd27c-pz4Y]

6 Siel bleu

Siel bleu promotes physical activity as a therapy for health acre and wellness, with specific programs targeted to freshly retired, senior citizen at home or in residence, and disabled persons.

They completed a perfect demo of their concept on stage, drawing the audience into simple and relaxing moves as shows the picture below!

7 Senai Sao Paolo

Senai is a training institute handled and funded by industry representatives: it includes 538 training centers, over 27 Brazilian states, 20 technological domains (bio, nano, and materials research), and delivers free lessons in technology and applied research. It has worked on nano application for water filtering, lab on chip technology to detect disease, simulation programmes and manufacturing control for factories, aerospace with France, and railway with Deutsche Bahn. Senai programs are designed in partnership with industries.

8 Curitiba

Curitiba is a pioneer city in sustainable development: “innovation is for us the way forward to sustainability, and a better quality of life” shares Gina Paladino. Curitiba metropole has a population of 3 millions, a 34 billion US$ GDP (80% of which are services), a 3% unemployment rate, and a 97,87 alphabetisation rate. Population diversity is at the basis of multiple creative projects. Gina stresses the continuity of the urban vision and planning, and the educational strenghth: 5 universities, and 80 institutes.

Cutibita is also the birthpace of the famous quiet and fuel efficient Hibribus, with subway-akin door system to get in and out of the bus. Check it out here.

Related post

image credits: Pierre Metivier RNDI Album, Montage_de_Curitiba CC BY SA 3.0 Mr.Jhosimar

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Radical and outstanding innovations was the focus of the 7th National Meeting of Innovation Directors hold in Paris last June.

‘Radical innovations mark a new era linked to performance far greater than at previous times. They are unusual, hence their “extraordinary” dimension. They appear at the end of a great wave of innovations, after the purely scientific and technical phase.’ explains master of ceremony Marc Giget.

Radical and extraordinary also involve social: are there access to key services (health, education, travel, housing, fulfilling jobs….) for those people who have in the past always been excluded? The 7th National meeting of chief Innovation Officers explores the world of innovations which improve life in an extraordinary way.’

The summit split into two parts, the Hermes award winners ceremony, and a series of thematic panels and lectures.

Hermes Award Ceremony

1. Haier

Haier is headed by his CEO, Zhang Ruilin, toward user-centric innovation for consumer electronics and home appliances: he set-up the washing machine that one can visit! Innovation starts from people’s needs, Haier believes in grassroot innovation, or inverted pyramid where innovation moves bottom-up. Haier runs user-centric platforms for design (‘690 platform’), a network of innovators for R&D, and develops social initiatives (Hope project for education :  “sincerely giving back to society”);

2 Fraunhofer

Fraunhofer Institutes are bridging the gap between research institutes and industry & startups in Germany with a network of 67 institutes and research units.

3 Interface

Interface is an ‘all green’ leader, aiming at ‘mission Zero’:

• Interface is the inventor of carpet tile which provides flexibility, and lets you reorganize space over time;
• Its French factory manufactures 13 m2  of carpet tile module per hour,  with a fully carbon-neutral footprint:
• Carpet raw material represents 65% of the polluting impact; therefore Interface uses vegetal fiber, and carpet standard set-up is performed without any glue;
• Interface commits to coinnovation to invent future solutions, with new technologies, and develops networks to refine supply chain and build inclusive business.

4 Sharemylesson

Sharemylesson is a sharing platform for teaching resources, designed by, and for professors. It comes near 300 000 online resources, and 3 m teachers are using it: “they want to improve their teaching, be helped to be more effective in their classroom with their students. Suppport is based on what students need, many resources are explicitely for students, for example practice sheets for students. Creativity comes from the teachers. It covers all grade levels. Peer review makes best supports emerge. The resources are owned by the teachers, they get credit, and they have followers. Sharemylesson does not sell, it is public domain: we do not control who uses it. Freedom of speech. Free to share to any teacher”.

5 Rewalk, Argo’s exoskelet

Rewalk is an exskeleton technology that aims at making the user independant. It’s globally easy to use, you just click and start to walk: “ReWalk controls movement using subtle changes in center of gravity, mimics the natural gait pattern of the legs, and provides functional walking speed. A forward tilt of the upper body is sensed by the system, which triggers the first step”.

We had a very impressive and moving demo on stage.

Paralysed athlete Claire Lomas finished the London Marathon in her bionic Rewalk suit, 16 days after she set off.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xd27c-pz4Y]

6 Siel bleu

Siel bleu promotes physical activity as a therapy for health acre and wellness, with specific programs targeted to freshly retired, senior citizen at home or in residence, and disabled persons.

They completed a perfect demo of their concept on stage, drawing the audience into simple and relaxing moves as shows the picture below!

7 Senai Sao Paolo

Senai is a training institute handled and funded by industry representatives: it includes 538 training centers, over 27 Brazilian states, 20 technological domains (bio, nano, and materials research), and delivers free lessons in technology and applied research. It has worked on nano application for water filtering, lab on chip technology to detect disease, simulation programmes and manufacturing control for factories, aerospace with France, and railway with Deutsche Bahn. Senai programs are designed in partnership with industries.

8 Curitiba

Curitiba is a pioneer city in sustainable development: “innovation  is for us the way forward to sustainability, and a better quality of life” shares Gina Paladino. Curitiba metropole has a population of 3 millions, a 34 billion US$ GDP (80% of which are services), a 3% unemployment rate, and a 97,87 alphabetisation rate. Population diversity is at the basis of multiple creative projects. Gina stresses the continuity of the urban vision and planning, and the educational strenghth: 5 universities, and 80 institutes.

Cutibita is also the birthpace of the famous quiet and fuel efficient Hibribus, with subway-akin door system to get in and out of the bus.  Check it out here.

Related post: RNDI 2014 (1/2)

image credits: Pierre Metivier RNDI Album, Montage_de_Curitiba CC BY SA 3.0 Mr.Jhosimar

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

I attended the 2014 Ouisharefest last May, a 3 days event about collaborative economy. Peter Hesseldahl was one of the presenter, and he shared his views in a previous post his views about massive platforms for cocreation. Below are a few additional notes I’ve grabbed from the various speakers during this event rich in food for thought.

A new play control

Design focus is changing: from finished products to processes, creating platforms for cocreation, and from provider to enabler.

The job to be done is moving:

• From owning and operating hotels to coordinating the use of rooms;
• From producing and broadcasting content, to managing platforms for interactions and exchanges;
• From mass production, ‘one size fits all’ and passive consumers, to customization, tools for participation, and creating community around the product to avoid commodization;

“For you, to you” is being replaced by “With you, by you”.

New roles are emerging:

• for consumers: co-creator, shared responsibility; producer intersecting with consumer: as people become users they become providers, helping to achieve parity in the collaboration;
• for managers: from control to influence, and leading across organization;
• for experts: enabling learning, health, innovation.

Renewed business model and organizational model

It’s not just about money, it’s about access and sharing: unused value is waste.

It’s not about ownership: there must be more to life than having everything!

It does not always have a business model: sometimes we do it only for pleasure.

In-direct relation from effort to benefits is changing: my success depends on the success of the others, I don’t see the success coming back to me directly, ‘me’ and ‘we’ intersect. Empathy is the driver building the link between people on collaborative platforms.

This ‘new normal’ requires new tools: trust (trust is central: in trust we trust!) and reputation mechanism, legal contracts for open IPR, organizational models, regulation, taxation, currencies, and vocabulary. We are moving from institutional to distributed power.

Large businesses operate to derisk from what’s going to happen, and potential disruption of their value chain.

Brands look for ways to avoid becoming obsolete, alike ‘tomorrow’s narrowband’, and building sustainable innovation, is another stake of akin cocreation platforms. Innovation is the brand’s lung, and cocreation seems the cornerstone to nurture the relationship between brand and community.

Credits: Ouishare, i-just-want-to-be-with-you couverturefacebook.com, Success is smile and silence dontgiveupworld.com, collaborative-economy forimmediaterelease.biz

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Have we entered the era of the user revenge on the technology? User has increased its position at the center of modern design. Even more, if user-centric design and design-thinking reflect the customer upstream involvement, new platforms are designed with and by customers, who act both as demanders and suppliers. Is it the brand which is now at the edge of user-centric business?

From ideation to product acceptance, an ongoing dialogue

By integrating user in the design process, the stakes are to better address customer needs, detect latent expectations, from functional feature to emotional experience with the product, create an environment of desire, nail differentiation attributes, and increase customer loyalty: the more customers engage with the brand, the more loyal they become.

Ideas crowdsourcing, filtering  a selection of best ideas, and implementing them, that’s the aim of web platforms such as My Starbuck Ideas,  Dell Idea Storm, Intel Make it Wearable, Casino Cvous, Imagine with Orange, and Sosh Ideas.

Next stage is about transforming the idea in concept and elegant customer experience: user can still be involved, and provide his feedback on future concept, or on product usability. The difficulty happens when viewpoints diverge, while you want your concept to converge…

User cooperation can happen online, through solution specific search platforms, where projects team form and collaborate, through online polls & testing lab web sites like Lab Orange or SFR Atelier. It can take place in real life, where customer brings back home the new product to experiment, like at Decathlon.

Co-design involves usually a limited number of users, but  Fiat Mio broke the glass ceiling by leading a first car design in open source mode: ‘more than 17,000 participants from around the world submitted more than 11,000 ideas. During the design process, people were able take part in many decisions like car colors and doors configuration’ (IdeaConnection / André Pinheiro).

Good ideas can come from inside the company naturally: participative innovation involve employees. Staff in relationship with customers, back-office employees, managers, or even data from machines, apps or any customer-facing interface, provide valuable insights.

It is worth as well listening to the customer in the post-launch stage to achieve quickly a succesful second release, or adjust the communication messages: do you remember the features shortcomings of the first iPhone that were shortly rectified in the second iPhone, like 3G, video capture, cut and paste interactions, MMS?

Products turn into platforms

We give you the tools, and you create: with platforms, third-parties like developers or partners are offered the opportunity to build value on top of them, and become producers. Designing for evolves in designing with.

With platforms, the creative product is never finished: it’s a living innovation, in a constant state of arousal, where users continuously shape the service. To some extent, the platform’s  user is the service.

The role of the designer or innovation manager is then to create platforms and toolkit that will help others to design. “Designer as integrator” enriches his role, and unleashes the creative potential of users by providing interactive tools: I’m not selling you a service, I’m selling you the ability to build your own. His toolbox is made of APIs, SDK, open source software and OS, open source objects, documentation, sandbox, user loop feedback … and last but not least, community evangelization, and community management.

The natural platforms examples are the App Store for iOS devices, or the Google Play for Android ones. Lego Cuusoo launched in 2008, and rebranded Lego Ideas in 2014,  is another platform instance: Lego provides the lego bricks, users create models, and Lego commercializes most popular models via its Lego distribution networks, online and retail. Threadless build another sucessful platform: it’s a marketplace for teeshirts, where tee-shirts are designed by an artist community, and get printed when they are popular enough with mass market community who scores them.

Here the stakes are to balance global scale and personalization, to develop a vivid ecosystem, and to adopt the ‘succeeding together’, ‘designing with’, and collaborative state of mind.

Consumers bring their own products

One step further, and users don’t leverage the platform to create new services: they bring their own product, and expose it on the market place. As people become users they become providers: it’s the collaborative or share economy. Such  platforms are named Wikipedia, AirB&B, Home Exchange, Blablacar, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang…

Peer to peer platforms facilitate sharing, collaborating, conversing: ‘For you, to you’ is being replaced by ‘With you, by you’. ‘Me’ and ‘We’ intersect. It’s not just about money, it’s about access and sharing, based on realizing that unused value is waste.

By combining personalization with global scale, and enabling a much more efficient use of resources, these platforms tend to become ‘the new normal’.

Sharing platforms require trust (trust is central: in trust we trust!) and reputation mechanism, that can brought by brands, hosting the various exchanges. Company can influence, but not control, and leadership becomes a matter of motivating others by the strength of your vision.

Castorama, DIY brand for home improvement, is engaging in collaborative DIY, faciliting education and tips sharing, sets-up wiki, Mooc, barcamps, 3D after-sales, open innovation projects, moving from selling things to helping people fix and improve their home.

The stakes for brands are to create a product-based community to avoid commoditization. Large businesses operate to derisk from what’s going to happen, and potential disruption of their value chain. Giving meaning to data collected through collaborative platforms can generate new business model. Reaching for ‘timeless beauty’,  avoiding to become obsolete, alike ‘tomorrow’s narrowband’, and building sustainable innovation, is another stake of this kind of co-creation.

While innovation is the brand’s lung, co-creation is the cornerstone to nurture the relationship between brand and community.

image credits: The cocreation effect francisgouillart.com, user-centered-design conselo.wordpress.com, Imagine with Orange, Testing new product smallbusinessbc.ca, innovation communities hyvecommunity.net, platform apulialogisticsystem.com, Threadless gq-magazine.co.ukCollaborative-Consumption-Rachel Botsman, road-to-the-horizon_freehdw.com

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Berlin is not the German state with the strongest economical power in the country: it may rank in GDP beyond Köln, Munchen, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Mainz corresponding states. But everyone who visits Berlin can feel the cultural atmosphere and the creative spirit which feed the German capital with an unrivaled soft power of innovation.

I had the chance to explore three Berliner innovation places that reflect this state of mind. Following previous post on place #1, below is the review of places #2 and #3.

2. Plug and play Axel Springer

Joerg Rheinboldt is MD of Axel Springer Plug & Play. Serial entrepreneur, expert in building ideas, companies and organizations, he told a fantastic story about Plus & Play.

Plug & Play started at beginning of 2013, following a JV between Axel Springer and Plus and Play US. It’s a small team of 5 people, all ‘swiss knifes’. Premises are typical berliner spirit, as it was former studio of an artist whose paintings are still on the wall. It is close to headquarters but not inside.

Plug & Play proposes a 3 months acceleration program for start-ups. It welcomes 10 to 15 companies, based on a standardized deal, 25k€ with 5% capital, very young companies with a lot of synergies with Axel in order to create as many opportunities as possible. At the end of  week 13 is Demo Day, were investors are invited for companies to pitch to them. Actually, contacts start before the demo day which turns more to be a party day!

Time spent is learning time, mainly to meet with other people, with 1 to 3 meetings every week. 120 mentors participate to a Mentoring Day: it’s a 90′ session with a team and 2 mentors, dedicated to experience sharing, and nurturing a shrewd deal flow for investors. Plug & Play companies are early stage, and need more money to go forward. Plug & play invests in the next stage only if an external investor is investing as well.

3 programs were completed so far: at the end of the third program, all companies found investment, amounting around dozen of k€, and up to 2 million.

Plug and Play went scouting start-ups in Tel Aviv: 23 companies were reviewed, and 7 were invited. The angle of Tel Aviv trip was to look for teams with technical competencies, as Berlin resources are more business executive oriented. Start-ups can come from every country to join Plug & Play.

Some start-ups examples are:

• a Ticketing company with a technical tweak, showing personal recommendation around you. A white label version of their product was implemented at Axel Springer media;
• Blogfoster, micro online marketing, combining high quality advertising  display on blogs, with a very targeted offer for brands;

The objective of Plug & play management is to build a portfolio, and see how it develops, knowing how much is spent, not knowing yet how much will get out. Another goal is to get in touch with entrepreneurs for the Axel management, and facilitate business relationships in a pragmatic way. For instance, the head of Axel Springer national sales introduced some start-ups to his customers, and one of them, acting in electronic distribution, cooperated with a startup on innovative indoor navigation, with ultra sound recognition.

Michael Paustian is Axel Springer Creative Director, and Head of Strategic Product Development. He drew some clear lines about Axel Springer digital transformation, showing impressive determination.

Axel Springer experience is related to media brands. Its digital endeavor consists in turning publishing brands into digital assets. While keeping major brands like Bild or die Welt, some core business were sold to speed up in digitazing: Axel Springer acquired new assets, like marketplace seloger.com and online media aufeminin.com, reaching a threshold of 64% from digital revenues. 180 companies were bought.

Similarly, Axel Springer progressively hired 120 coders to run digital projects in the agile way (scrum and sprint) which is popular in the Silicon Valley. Axel Springer ambition is to remain n°1 media publisher, and to be n°1 market place in Europe.

Acquisition strategy has 3 main targets:

1. Buy new things: 1.4 billion is dedicated to spend on acquisition, going for early stage and pioneer companies;
2. Plug and play, similar to a VC game;
3. Build ventures with companies, by use of revisited corporate venture, involving close business cooperation.

This third domain represents much higher ticket sizes: Axel Spinger funded 9 companies where it owns the majority. The focus is on something where Axel Springer can leverage its capabilities: Axel spinger provides reach, audience, and marketers, helping to monetize much faster. The challenge is to act in start-up mode,  and Axel Springer Ideas considers itself as a toolbox for the ventures, providing support when they ask.

A successful case is about shopping: Shop Now suggests personalized offer on your phone when you enter a shop. Axel Springer marketers connect the service with the brands. They get an incentive, a share in Shop Now. 11 people are dedicated to help start-ups find their way.

3 Berlin partner

Berlin partner reminded me of Paris Region Economic Development Agency. Its aim is to welcome businesses, and help them to grow. 5 innovative clusters are targeted: Healthcare, ICT / Media / Creative industries, Transport / Mobility, Energy, and Photonics.

Berlin Partner promotes the image of the city with design challenges like ‘Invent the next Berlin’s souvenir’ ( the Design Souvenir Award).

Large companies like Pro Sieben, Google, Gaming companies are taking ground in Berlin. Berlin offers training and cooperation with Hochschule and Universities, and is a launchpad for German and international market.

What makes Berlin so uniquely innovative?

It’s a mix of :

• Free space: Berlin was designed for 11 millions inahbitants, and actually holds 4 millions;
• Vivid information sharing in the clusters;
• Virtuous entrepreneurship cycle, with successful start-ups founders reinvesting in new ventures; a hundred of emblematic start-ups are listed on the gorgeous wall ‘the hundert‘;
• Cross-culture platforms with Berlin weeks (fashion week, web week, re:publica, game week;
• Junction with more traditional industries, like industrial design (Bauhaus-Archiv Museum is in Berlin, and Berkin is UNESCO City of Design).

This formula shapes Berlin as a playground for experimentation, with tolerance for uncertainty and risk. As Axel from Hub:raum sums it up: ‘More and more people want to build a company, and if it fails, well, it’s OK.’

image credits: sportslab.ch, Axel Springer, deutsche-startups.de, ds.de, Berlin Partner

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Berlin is not the German state with the strongest economical power in the country: it may rank in GDP beyond Köln, Munchen, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Mainz corresponding states. But everyone who visits Berlin can feel the cultural atmosphere and the creative spirit, which feed the German capital with an unrivaled soft power of innovation.

I had the chance to explore three Berliner innovation hot spots that reflect this state of mind.

1. Hub:raum international

Axel Menneking is responsible for the international Program Management of  Hub:raum, the  international incubator of Deutsche Telekom. He presented to the Hub:raum with great enthusiasm and expertise, and I was impressed by the work achieved in this short period of time.

Hub:raum derives from the challenging innovation context in the digital industry: tech start-ups benefit from open source, cloud, developers, they start first and fast; new OTT competitors, like Whatsapp, emerge at rapid pace. Deutsche Telekom is the leading European Telco provider, with integrated IP networks, best customer experience, a desire to win with partners, and a will to lead in business. Unfortunately, no one from the Telcos has yet found the magic formula to build from the inside something like a Facebook or an Ebay.

As a response to this need for speed and creativity, Hub:raum was established, focusing at seed & early stage funding, and developing smart partnering: mentoring, office hosting, and financing (DT fast funding up to k€ 300, and preparing the next round with VCs). Process starts with acceleration period, 3 to 6 months before investment: no money involved, no strings attached, the aim is to build a product to show, and to introduce start-ups to the organization.

Hub:raum scouts the market in consistency with DT innovation priorities (Cloud, IoT, TV, Security, Telecom Network, … no social media, e-commerce or gaming). Hub raum is part of  DT Product and Innovation division.

Hub:raum premises are simple but reflect great modernity: flexible meeting rooms, basic garage working floors, videoconference, open space for conference (available even for non Hub:raum residents), and kitchen for team breakfast! I particularly liked the idea that start-ups drag furnitures from the warehouse, and drop it onto their plan. Hub:raum is located near a DT Lab, which designs products like Mozilla phones.

Hub:raum was set-up as a separate brand, heading to external networks, and deeply tied to innovation ecosystem. It is located in Berlin for Western Europe (10 people + 65 start-up staff), Krakow (5), and Tel Aviv (1). It has already received over 3000 applications, accelerated 37 start-ups, completed 10 investments, and was granted with Best Accelerator award. Application process is fast, and runs over 8 weeks: 4 weeks from application to investment decision, 4 weeks for legal.

Top learnings that Axel liked to share are:

1. A clear incubation vision: geographical scope, innovation, not money first;
2. Top management support & internal alliance: connecting to DT business is the holy grail, but search for specific companies to complement their portfolio, can be performed as a service to DT BUs; a separate team channels the demands to the business managers, who look for start-ups: when they find a fit, they facilitate the discussion with the BUs;
3. A start-up hub organization, mixing corporate and investor competencies, and with coworking and event spaces;
4. A network with all parties of the ecosystem: reputation in the market (don’t sell lies, like connecting to all DT customers), success stories with famous mentors;
5. Value and differentiation in completing projects with business owners, going for quality, and investing in a selection of start-ups, not entering too quickly.

The vision is to build a portfolio whose value over time (5 to 7 years) pays for the organization Opex, to inject innovation into DT organization, help the brand with a renewed flavour, and attract talents.

Even if multiple of ten millions would be a very good outcome, it is still very small at DT scale: Hub:raum acts more as a tool to transform the organization, a change management tool. Telcos are in the process of redefining themselves as platforms, like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google and their apps store. Collaborating with start-ups is a way to build that, just like the opening of APIs.

image credits: Hub:raum, Berlin Partner

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Sophie Cohendet is passionate about start-ups and innovative environments. She has a strong interest for collaborative & open innovation as well as management innovation.

As a consultant, she works for major corporations to help them connect with their external ecosystem (start-ups, Customers, R&D Labs, Universities…) in France and abroad. Thus, she had the chance to assist the French private-label biscuit manufacturer Poult for one year.

In this post, she explains how innovating in management should be next CEO’s priority.

Why?

Nowadays, all companies are facing the same business’s challenges:

1. Environment uncertainty: over the last decade, the companies’ environment pace of change has sharply speeded up. In the coming years, changes will continue to occur exponentially, and will test the resilience of companies. The challenge is thus to intensify the strategic renewal of companies to go at the pace of the environment.

2. Hyper-competition: there are less and less entry barriers due to advanced technologies. These technologies remove transaction costs as well as distribution monopolies, and put more power in the hands of consumers. The competition can pop up from nearly everywhere and is not always in companies’ field of vision. Companies have to hyper-innovate, in other words make innovation everyone’s everyday job (No less!). They must even include other stakeholders like users and partners in this momentum (as it is the case in massive cocreation platforms for example).

3. Employee demotivation: Companies are more and more concerned by well-being of employees and their happiness at work. Employees often feel that they are only using a tiny part of their skills and potential at work, leading them to be less involved and motivated at work. Companies are struggling to create an engaging work environment that will inspire employees, and allow them to give the very best of themselves, thus retaining them within the company.

Management Innovation

One of the answers to address these three challenges is innovation, and companies have tried it under various forms: process innovation, product/service innovation, Business model innovation, and last but not least management innovation. This last innovation refers to « anything that substantially alters the way in which the management is carried out, or significantly modifies customary organizational forms, and, by so doing, advances organizational goals » according to Gary Hamel, innovation referring thinker, and founder of the international management consulting firm Strategos.

In the current context, management innovation can be seen as the most powerful competitive advantage as it is in-depth shaping an unrivaled corporate identity (which cannot easily be copied !).

Some companies, in France and abroad, estimate that there is no point to continue to fight and survive in this changing environment with yesterday’s management practices, and have already understood why management innovation matters.

Management innovation is all about less control and authority, less of employee infantilism and more collective regulation, more of employee empowerment and autonomy… And autonomy is truly the mother of motivation. It is a real shift from an autocratic style of management to a democratic one.

Management innovation could bring answers to the three business challenges mentioned above. Actually, management innovation is key to develop company resilience, to foster innovation and to achieve greater happiness at work.

Resilience

Innovation management is based on flat structures and no more on pyramids, which is a source for higher flexibility. Actually companies can react quicker than in a traditional structure to environment changes. Companies can manage with more flexibility and reactivity their core-activities thanks to small-size flat divisions or teams.

They are also able to answer quickly to new demands and opportunities induced by environment changes. As such, management innovation strengthens the companies’ resilience.

Adopt a customer-centric organization for a better flexibility and reactivity

To increase their reactivity to market changes, some companies have adopted new customer-centric organizations. These organizations are often small teams far from a hierarchical stratification! They can react quickly to clients’ needs and are animated by a leader chosen by his peers.

This is the case at FAVI (a French company manufacturing copper alloys), which has organized all the company in various mini-factories, each dedicated to a customer, to improve teams’ reactivity and flexibility. FAVI is now the European leader in gearbox forks manufacturing.

Generate and finance new strategic options

In parallel to current activities, it is crucial to generate new strategic options out of the core-business to be able to adapt to the radical changes in the core market, and prepare for the future. As an example, the French private-label biscuit manufacturer, Poult, has opened a corporate incubator to turn employees into entrepreneurs. Incubator welcomes any employee willing to launch a new activity for the group, offering him coaching, time and budget to start this activity.

The exploration of new activities by groups is sadly dependent on their ability to allocate resources towards these new innovative projects in a short-termist environment! At Poult, the yearly financial resources are no more allocated by the head of Finance but by a group of a dozen of employees representative of the different departments (Sales, Marketing, Production,…) and factories of the group. The decisions are made with new criteria studied to balance short-term and long-term decisions. This process is surely slower than in “normal” companies however the decisions taken are based on collective intelligence. Consequently, everyone in the company understands these decisions and therefore time is saved during the implementation phase.

Hyper-innovation

Groups implementing management innovation are structured as networks and as such are often compared to democracies. These companies are spaces where employees are free to experiment, can give free rein to their creativity and have the right to fail. They intend to be real spaces of expression and freedom to unleash innovation and creativity to be able to react to an hyper-competitive environment. In these companies, managers and teams are constantly chasing meaningless daily processes, fight against bureaucracy (see Netflix, Editor’s note) and take care of employees’ time.

Favour the internal debate

In these companies, innovative managers constantly promote the internal debate by encouraging teams to question the strategic hypothesis implicitly shared by everyone for decades in order to enable them to innovate! New technologies, such as enterprise social networks, have considerably eased these debates, and have participated to the development of free-expression spaces in companies.

But beyond these technologies, some companies have settled up ambitious initiatives to favour this exercise, which is the case at Semco (a Brazilian manufacturer of steel-based products for naval industry). This company is managed by a 6-member committee with a rotating 6-month presidency. At each committee meeting, 2 seats are available for anyone in the company willing to express its point of view on the topic discussed on that day.

Fight against the “creative apartheid”, and take time to innovate

Most companies suffer from “creative apartheid” as Gary Hamel liked to remind us. Actually, companies have reserved the so-called creative skills to the happy few. However, companies are laden with creative employees that are dying to give their ideas and develop them even in fields like finance where creativity seems far away from their daily tasks.

Some companies, like Poult, have trained voluntary-employees to creativity facilitation, in order to develop these skills in all the areas of the group: in production, in marketing, in sales, and even in the accounting department… Seeds have been sowed, the gardener patience is now needed to collect the fruit of this training.

Happiness at work

Beyond increasing the resilience and ability to innovate, management innovation is a way to achieve greater happiness at work. Employees’ motivation is an endless question for companies, and is directly correlated to the employees’ happiness level. Step by step, some managers become aware of the power of intrinsic motivation levers: autonomy, mastery, and purpose [Intrinsic motivation levers defined by Daniel Pink in Drive : The Surprising Truth About What Motivates (2009)].

In organizations sensible to management innovation, managers spend time to convey to their teams why their job matters and is important to the rest of the organization (purpose). They also enable their teams to develop skills and get them to a point where they need to make decisions on their own (mastery and autonomy). Management innovation is required to imagine new ways to activate these levers, and create enough diversity within the company in order to help every employee to find its own path of development.

In a nutshell

Management innovation is a real opportunity to build a human company truly adapted to the future. It is undoubtedly everyone’s concern, even if the answer brought by each company depends on factors such as the company size, its context and culture.

Management innovation is a hard and long track to take, on which people first see the costs and not the benefits. Such changes in company’s organization only work when they are triggered, encouraged, and backed by the top management with an ambitious vision.

Writing this vision with all the stakeholders of the company is undoubtedly a good starting point to go into management innovation: write together “Why” you should go on that track, and the “How” will come next.

image credits: Uncertainty (eccforum.csc.alaska.edu), Management Innovation (integnology.com), defining autonomy (curiousattemptbunny.com), resilience (journal.media-culture.org.au), Favi Zobrist (point-fort.com), Connected cookie biscuit connecté Poult (lamelee.com), Semco-workplace-democracy (fdi.sasociety.in), Creative faciliation Card-Circle (dynamicgroups.com.au), happiness-believing-water-cooler (forbes.com)

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GUEST POST from Nicolas Bry — originally published on Innovation Excellence.

Following landmark meeting with Paris Region Lab – a vivid initiative headed by Jean-François Gallouin to develop Parisian incubators, and support start-ups in accessing city RFPs, and handle innovative experiments over the Greater Paris territory-  I had the chance to listen to Cécile Tevet, and discover another side illustrating how Paris has become truely digital.

‘Digital native’, Paris cannot be, due to its respectable age; but ‘digital friendly’, yes we can!

Cécile Tevet is International Business Development Director IT& Software at Paris Region Economis Development Agency. The Paris Region Economic Development Agency is a non-profit organization providing services to foreign companies to soft land in the region. Its experts can support in accessing the market, partnering with private and public research programs, finding premises, taking care of the environment, recruiting people, getting all the legal and tax information needed to set-up your activity.

Cécile is particularly active in the IT & Software field, promoting the Paris Region Business & Research ecosystem, and attracting inward investments: HQ & Sales offices, R&D centers, Strategic and Business partnerships.

Paris Region combines 4 key assets for digital innovation:

1. a large adressable market: Paris region is third highest concentration of ‘Fortune 500’ companies in the world, and ranks first in Europe, with a GDP of $Md 845 in 2011; 11,7 millions people live in Paris region, and 42 millions people come to visist Paris each year;
2. a region keen on innovation with partnerships with research centers CEA and Inria, an impressive number of 100 000 reserchers working in the area, and a tax rebate incentive for innovation investment;
3. an amazing set of skills with top 3 schools both in Business and IT & Engineering; new type of digital schools are soaring; they are named  Web school Factory, Ecole 42, or Simplon, involving revisited ways of teaching; several Masters are dedicated to Innovation, crossing multiple disciplines such as design thinking or tech start-up approach (PIC, School Lab CPI, MTI and Telecom EMBA); Stanford has even launched with Polytechnique school a Parisian version of its famous Stanford Ignite acceleration program for innovators and entrepreneurs!
4. active opinion leaders buidling a vision of digital transformative potential.

Cécile was presenting at API Days, and she developed her vision about the evolutionary path API follow from consumer web services to infrastructure, and business processes, giving examples of Parisian start-ups developing slick APIs: Leetchi.com, a collective funding pot exposing a financial payment API, Box API for Nuxeo content management platform, or the API combinator, Webshell. Cécile focuses mainly on Cloud, API management, Open source, Embedded systems, and IT security.

Cécile also helps Entrepreneurs to start their activity in Paris region, a thriving place for tech ventures she says: ‘In Paris, we have a convergence of a very active development community, market traction for new usage in technology, and a real innovation-driven consciousness supported through public policies and private entrepreneurship. You can see this in the proliferation of incubators and accelerators here providing a strong support environment for new startups to operate in.’

Would you like to dig into Paris burgeoning digital activities, and dedicated support for start-ups? Check-out these links:

• Paris Region Lab, city of Paris opening its RFP to start-ups, and supporting innovative experiments, and Paris Incubateurs;
• Coworking, incubation, meeting, and events place: Numa Paris, ‘the place to go’;
• Parisian community of start-ups: My Start-up Paris;
• Start-up launch pad: 3 Day Start-up, StartinParis, and Fing Digital Think Tank, Carrefour des Possibles;
• Accelerators: Orange Fab France (Paris) and Hello Start-up radio show with BFM, Top Parisian accelerators and incubators, Google for Entrepreneurs;
• Yearly Parisian digital fest: Futur en Seine
• La French Tech (#FrenchTech);
• Cap Digital, French Digital cluster based in Paris.

And get in touch with Cécile!

image credits: Paris Region Eco Dev Agency, Paris coexist.com-shutterstock, Cécile Tevet Paris Region

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