The intrapreneur path, from incubation to business launch
Leonard’s 8-month intrapreneur path provides tailored coaching and training for all VINCI company employees. It puts intrapreneurs in touch with a network of experts and mentors, and embarks them on a two-phase programme to set up their business: part-time incubation to turn their idea into a project, then acceleration to develop a novel and workable product or service.
Three cohorts are on Leonard:Paris intrapreneur paths today: 33 intrapreneurs working on 29 projects have started the incubation phase and 8 of them have since moved on to the acceleration or launch phase.
One of the intrapreneurs in the first cohort, Karim Selouane (Sixense, VINCI Construction) presented Resallience, VINCI’s design office focused on adapting projects, cities, communities, infrastructure and their uses to climate change. Resallience, in other words, provides consulting, business strategy and modelling services geared to identifying the risks associated with climate change and to adapting accordingly.
Damien Bahon (GTM Bâtiment, VINCI Construction France) presented his trailblazing business, Rehalib, with a live demo. Rehalib uses virtual reality to take digitalisation to the next level on renovation and redevelopment projects. This technology treats all users – all the way to end users – to a seamless experience. It is mainstreaming the use of digital modelling and virtual reality on building revamps, enabling users to walk through and explore their project intuitively before approving it, exporting it and sending it to the construction supervisor.
To wrap up this session on the Intrapreneurs path, the people working on the 10 projects in the 2019 cohort, which recently began their incubation phase, presented their business ideas.
How the Leonard Studio is supporting startups
Leonard set up its Studio a few months ago, specifically for the most innovative projects from VINCI companies and outside startups. The Leonard Studio works with the operations-side entities sponsoring the project (through partnerships or otherwise providing support) and surrounds early-phase startups with a unique working environment designed to spur new business models (tailored entrepreneurial backing, pressure to deliver results fast, and all the benefits of Leonard’s position as the interface with the VINCI ecosystem).
Several of the startups that the Leonard Studio is supporting and/or hosting presented their projects, including:
- Wind My Roof, a company set up by three student-entrepreneurs from Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, an engineering school. They fit wind turbines onto roof rims to generate electricity with the resulting Venturi effect. Their main customers are companies and communities that want to lower their electricity bills while advancing the energy transition.
- Cyclope, a startup that is leveraging artificial intelligence to enhance motorways and roads, set up by VINCI Autoroutes. Its overarching goal is to usher road infrastructure into the AI era by designing software solutions for infrastructure operation. Cyclope integrates deep-learning models, which process large amounts of still and video footage flowing in from the roads themselves, to create and fine-tune an automatic real-time vehicle classification system for toll-road managers.
- E-Béton, the first independent digital interface between worksites and mixer plants, is an innovative solution developed to add transparency to transactions. Plants use this solution to optimise their management; worksites use it to monitor and shed light on their organisation, and to manage all their delivery documents digitally.
If you’re a VINCI employee or startup founder and determined to make a difference in the construction, mobility or energy landscape, the Intrapreneur path and Leonard Studio are open and we look forward to hearing from you! Contact us to talk about how we can help you take your project to the next level.
