an inhouse incubator

With the explocentre, the France Telecom Group innovates even within the field of innovation and introduces groundbreaking new methods:
The customer is always at the centre of the creation process and contributes to innovation through the design stage.
The teams are brought together at the same location and work like genuine internal start-ups.

The challenge facing the explocentre is to:
•    identify new revenue sources
•    open up new  business territories
•    win back strategic target audiences

To achieve this, the explocentre introduced:
•    new methods based on co-creation with customers and partners, using design to drive innovation. Ideas for services are investigated, tested and re-worked with our customers to find a real value potential.
•    new project management and selection methods, based on trial-and-error and investor models

The explocentre is an ‘incubator, hosting and supporting innovative projects that operate like small-scale internal start-ups. Each project consists of a multi-disciplinary ‘core team’ working in close collaboration with regular contributors from the entire group.

All sorts of concepts are explored here and launch decisions are made by an investor-type governance committee. At each phase of the project, the decision can be made to halt the project, accelerate it into Time To Market, or continue exploration.

The explocentre is a link between proposals submitted by any group entity (primarily R&D) and the technocentre/business units, to speed up business innovation. This approach does not replace R&D, whose researchers and experts keep the group at the forefront of innovation, and especially technological innovation. It simply complements R&D by being more focused on concrete business projects likely to generate new products and services in the short and medium term.

Situated upstream from the technocentre, which implements "mature" concepts, the explocentre concentrates on nurturing highly innovative concepts with strong potential, but that could be deemed too risky to be placed directly on the market.

Once explored, concepts are submitted to the technocentre, where they are either industrialised for a commercial launch or transferred to a spin-off or joint venture for development.