FROM ROUTE 128 NEAR BOSTON TO THE FOUNDATION OF BT2I®: 40 YEARS OF CAPITALIZATION OF EXPERIENCE AND METHODOLOGIES TO OPTIMIZE BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY INTELLIGENCE SERVICES FOR INNOVATION PLAYERS AND DECISION MAKERS.
In 1979, year of the invention of the Sony’s WalkMan®, when a partner and I have founded Innovation 128®, totaling then less than 50 years of age together, we had a simple but ambitious idea: to facilitate the matching of technological offers and demands at the international level. In those days, before the internet time, when people didn’t talk about Open Innovation, some pioneers like Labs and Companies as French Armines, EDF, former CNET, now Orange Labs, CEA, former Aerospatiale, now Airbus, Snecma Group, former Elf Aquitaine Group, now merged in Total, TNO in the Netherlands, the British Technology Group, different Fraunhofer Institutes (and many others in EU and in the USA, including MIT and even in the former USSR) had the intuition that it was advantageous and virtuous for them to value their technologies to SMEs to ensure that their network of subcontractors have capacity to offer innovations allowing them to be competitive and sustainable on the international marketplace.
These pioneers, being the first to trust us, had paved the way, co-constructed and tested our methodologies. Over 30 years later, Open Innovation has become an essential part of innovation strategies of the winning labs and companies of any size, around the world.
More than ever, in our globalized economy, and in order to identify in advance the risks and opportunities that could be represented by the technological breakthroughs and innovative business models, agile companies must access, in real time, to business and technology intelligence, validated by experts, and must capitalize all these assets in appropriate KM systems.
The hard point is not in the availability of the information which is wide opened, but the large number of data, the difficulty to identify before competitors technological nuggets and the degree of confidence you may have on sources and intelligence.
Since 1980, having served more than a thousand of laboratories, companies and territories to enable them to identify and validate their partners, to facilitate, support and secure their scientific and technological cooperation in different parts of the world, create value and jobs, we have developed methodologies that have shown their operational effectiveness.
Today, the ambition of BT2i® is to use this know-how, methodologies and skills developed by more than hundred consultants and experts to whom I’m grateful for their expertise and loyalty.
Our vision is that semantic tools, which become more and more effective and that we use every working day, are in fact available to our experts and consultants but they will not replace human intelligence at a visible horizon.
BT2i® continues to be a trusted partner for labs and innovative companies for the implementation of their Open Innovation. Operational objective is clear: success for their scientific cooperation and international technology transfers, in and out. It is really the BT2i®’s DNA.
Marc-Henri MENARD
President
