The Open Innovation Club

PRIME and the French Consulate in San Francisco came together to create an ‘open innovation club’ , a collection of large French and American companies aimed at fostering open innovation across all stake holders in the innovation ecosystem through an open innovation platform: large companies, start-ups, research labs and universities.

The club will partner together with US French Tech Hub which was inaugurated on February 2014 by the President Francois Hollande during his visit in the Silicon Valley. Mr. Hollande sighted how innovation is the key to everything in globalization and large companies should support innovation coming from other companies. He also mentioned that another way to advance innovation in France was by encouraging big companies e.g. MEDEF to work together with aspiring entrepreneurial graduate students and mentor them so as for them to open new business there on after, something the big Californian companies are already doing.

>>Read also: Corporates Open Innovation Centers

Mr. Hollande sighted “Large companies should support innovation coming from other companies.”

The open innovation club has already met on several occasions to test their collaboration and open innovation platform.

On September 2013 in San Francisco during a full day conference on the theme ‘smart cities’. 15 startups in urban innovation met 15 large corporations including EDF R&D USA, TOTAL New Energies, Winnovation-Bouygues, Renault Silicon Valley, BNP Paribas l ‘Atelier, Veolia, Orange, La Poste, Qualcomm, PG&E, IBM, Oracle, Accenture as well as University of California CITRIS, French Research Institute Inria and the cities of San Francisco and Palo Alto represented by their Chief Information and Innovation Officers. They also met at Stanford University in preamble of the California France Forum of Energy Efficiency Technologies (CaFFEET) in a workshop to share best practices on the emerging discipline of Data Governance, a topic under great scrutiny with the explosion of big data, security and privacy issues.