Innovation & foresight
CREATING NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR GROUP COMPANIES
VINCI practises open innovation. It supports a collaborative approach that connects its in-house teams, who are encouraged to reveal the innovation potential of their businesses, with external partners in their ecosystem, especially startups. Each business line houses an innovation platform for its sphere of activity, and all contribute to and benefit from the multi-business structures set up by the Group.
LEONARD
VINCI’s innovation and foresight platform, Leonard, supported 45 projects in 2021, developed by Group employees (the Intrapreneurs and AI programmes) and by startups (the Seed and Catalyst programmes). Since Leonard’s inception in 2017, about 10 new subsidiaries or business activities have been created at VINCI through the Intrapreneurs track. Startup partners have worked with Group companies to test and deploy solutions that simultaneously drive their own growth and contribute to the transformation of their business activities. On VINCI’s first Leonard Day, 1,500 employees took part in an overview of Leonard’s incubated projects over the past five years that have since become real-life solutions, mainly addressing the ecological transition and digital transformation of VINCI’s businesses.
Leonard has also facilitated the emergence of construction tech. Its report on construction tech in Europe, co-published with the media website Sifted, attracted interest from many industry professionals and investors. Leonard also renewed its partnership with Construction Startup Competition, an initiative bringing more than 2,000 innovation-driven solutions to the attention of major construction players. The platform took part in other flagship industry events such as Moniteur Innovation Day, the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit promoting deep tech and France Digital Day.
In its foresight work, Leonard created a new think tank to explore opportunities for developing the hydrogen sector and held a series of conferences on this topic, in tandem with Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale (SEIN). Leonard also mobilised employees from all VINCI businesses and involved its foresight programmes and its acceleration programmes for innovative projects in efforts revolving around health and safety applied to the Group’s lines of work. Leonard’s Building Beyond festival focused on the “decisive decade” for the environmental transition of cities and regions. It featured 80 speakers and attracted more than 1,000 participants to its 26 events, broadcast live from Leonard: Paris.
After rolling out its programmes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 2020, with the support of local VINCI Construction and VINCI Energies subsidiaries, Leonard continued to branch out internationally. Some 130 startups from 30 countries applied for the Seed acceleration programme, helping partner projects to raise their initial capital from investors, and half of the new AI projects to be supported in 2022 originated from outside France.
LAB RECHERCHE ENVIRONNEMENT
lab recherche environnement, a research programme that emerged from a partnership begun in 2008 by VINCI and three ParisTech schools (Mines, École des Ponts and Agro), supported 18 PhD, post-doctoral and other research projects in 2021 relating to VINCI’s business activities in four areas of expertise: nature in the city, neighbourhood-wide life cycle analysis, energy efficiency of buildings and sustainable mobility. Some of its work is conducted as part of the research & solutions programme and introduces new research topics relating to VINCI’s green solutions. “Mirror groups” of VINCI employees work alongside researchers to identify potential demonstrators among the Group’s building and infrastructure projects, adding a strong applied component to their scientific research. Likewise, lab-to-market workshops, like the one in 2021 on solutions using life cycle analysis, help to detect new business opportunities for the Group, based on research carried out in its various industries.
lab recherche environnement regularly shares its research through conferences, which were attended by a total of 2,500 participants in 2021, and publications such as the report on low-carbon mobility produced jointly with Cerema and Construction21.
LA FABRIQUE DE LA CITÉ
La Fabrique de la Cité is a think tank focusing on urban transitions. In 2021, it informed the debate on the future of cities and regions by exploring four foundational themes: medium-sized cities, mobility and inequalities, no net land take, and green growth in cities. One of the many public events held during the year was the University of the City of Tomorrow summit, a joint initiative with Fondation Palladio, which brought more than 150 decision-makers in the public and private sectors together in Chantilly (north of Paris). The think tank also hosted its second Medium-Sized Cities Meeting, in Cahors (southern France). The three-day event mingled physical and virtual conferences and round tables. La Fabrique also produced and published 10 written portraits of local officials who share their ideas for development amid changing landscapes and lifestyles.
La Fabrique adapted its activities to the context of the pandemic, producing two podcast series on new forms of urban mobility and peri-urban challenges, in partnership with the magazines Capital and La Gazette des Communes, respectively.