In 2025, Expertise France worked closely with the Paris Innovation Directors’ Club (Club des Directeurs de l’Innovation de Paris), a network bringing together Chief Innovation Officers and their teams from France’s largest corporations (CAC 40 and SBF 120). These members are ideal beneficiaries of the EU–LAC Digital Accelerator programme, which aims to support innovation departments in delivering their PoCs.
Throughout the year, this collaboration led several major groups to engage with our program, including Airbus Atlantic, Michelin, Avril, Groupe SOS and Geofit. Beyond connections, participation in the Club’s sessions enabled the EU-LAC team to learn, compare approaches, sharpen its strategy, and better anticipate shifts in innovation priorities.
A key moment came in March, during a session focused on global megatrends and their implications for corporate strategy. The Strategic Foresight 2025–2050 provided an overview of major transitions and risks shaping the coming decades, from geopolitics and demographics to climate constraints, rare resources, technology shifts, urbanisation and finance. For us, it provided a clearer view of where large corporate actors may focus investments and which types of partnerships and PoCs are likely to gain traction over time.
The final session of the year, on December 11th, directly aligned with our ambition to build international bridges, focused on internationalisation of innovation strategies. As more markets prefer solutions developed jointly rather than imported, French corporate teams need to engage earlier with local ecosystems abroad to build lasting access to new markets. Several multinational French groups like Thales, RATP-Dev, Alstom, SLB, showcased how they adapt to this.
All along 2025, these exchanges gave the Expertise France–EU-LAC team a front-row seat to the priorities and dynamics shaping France’s corporate innovation ecosystem. Participation in the Paris Innovation Directors’ brought the programme closer to the decision-making arena of major French groups. This will continue into 2026, with a stronger focus on challenge-driven engagement and accelerated partnerships to expand opportunities for cross-regional PoCs.
If you would like to learn more, the Club’s content is publicly available online, including selected sessions and interventions.
