An industrial sponsor’s conference in the New Product Design Course at Mines ParisTech

Meet the Chair: An Industrial Sponsor

grusonInterview of Manuel GRUSON,
3DS Strategy Director at
DASSAULT SYSTEMES

By Kenza EL QAOUMI

Can you describe your activities within DASSAULT SYSTEMES?

I am responsible of the Strategy within DASSAULT SYSTEMES.  My role is to detect, prioritize and plan the moves that will help the company disruptively reinvent itself and achieve its ambition. The company innovates constantly and develops the Software Suite for Innovation: From Computer-Aided Design (CAD) to Digital Mock-Up (DMU) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), we are now at a new development stage: the 3DEXPERIENCE. It goes way beyond IT and software, we are enabling the structural Business transformation of our customers.

Over the years, DASSAULT SYSTEMES improved and extended its offer, and has increased size and coverage, with customers in more than 140 countries. This rapid growth was fueled by organic developments, as well as partnerships and acquisitions. The role of this ecosystem and the management of those relationships are critical to our development, and the delivery of the Value to our customers. If you think we can together bring an increased Value proposition, don’t hesitate to contact us, whether you are in what you perceive as a “traditional” market for us or not.

My team is a small group of highly-recognized experts within the company. We work both in influence of the company operations, and in project-mode on strategic topics and external growth qualification. I also work transversally with a team of partner managers within the Brands, in order to animate and steer our complementary-applications partnership programs. Our role is to constantly stimulate the emergence of disruptive innovations.

One key aspect of our work is to involve transversally the company. This specificity enables a wide strategic coverage (with around 11,000 employees), early detection of weak signals, leveraging of the top-notch knowledge of the best experts, best decisions, and the preparation of the integration (in the case of external growth). On a daily basis, what does it mean? Multitasking, for sure. Work and coordination acheter viagra en ligne paypal meetings for projects, exchange sessions on strategic topics to find new angles, bringing together diverse expertise and points of views.

Innovation at DASSAULT SYSTEMES is pulled forward by our strong strategic vision and is not limited to our incremental capability to improve. Because we have an ambitious reason for being, it creates naturally a consistent momentum to rethink our scope and to reinvent ourselves. Our purpose is the acid test that helps qualifying our ideas and proposed breakthroughs: Why are we doing this innovation? Does my idea get me significantly nearer to my objective? In particular, this avoids a random exploration process and facilitates the decision making. When you know why, you already have half the solution.

In this context, what are the links between your activities and the work of the Chair?

Two links: DASSAULT SYSTEMES is constantly innovating, and we are providing software & solutions for our customers to innovate.

For those two reasons, we are interested in the systematic approaches that can help understanding, enable and facilitate innovation. The C-K theory is definitely one significant step in that direction, towards explicit methods and tools to boost innovation, by structuring knowledge and generating new product concepts.

We start applying those to ourselves, and then gradually see how it can impact our offer to Customers. That first application on ourselves is a critical field-test to the value that we want to create for all companies in all Industries, and for the Society in general.

In practice, we observe that the human factor is also very important, and innovation is not limited to the intellectual finding of new concepts. How to motivate? How to inspire without narrowing too much initiatives? How to infuse a change in identity and purpose without removing all reference points? How to embark an ecosystem of partners? The relationship with the Chair can also help us for those stakes, less theoretical but needed for Innovation.