Total and Axway open their doors on Open Innovation

The Open Innovation Department of our customer, Total Marketing and Services (one of the four main branches of Total), invited Axway to be a part of the Learning Expedition (LEX). Total organized the LEX with their innovative partners at La Défense, as a follow up to our collaboration during DataCity.

During the Learning Expeditions in La Défense last week, little groups of Total employees visited companies and discovered their concrete innovations. The idea was to inspire their employees by showing them how other companies innovate. LEX is open to all Total employees, not only the managers.

On October 15 and 16, Axway welcomed over 40 Total employees to visit our Griffin innovation Lab, play with IOT demonstrations on healthcare and insurance, and discover business cases on urban mobility, energy and connected bins.

Open Innovation

François Hot, Collaborative Innovation Manager and Jérôme Tan, Open Innovation Manager, provided their vision of Open Innovation and Total’s initiatives in this domain.

Total’s innovation teams are in charge of open innovation with startups, as well as collaborative innovation with the employees of the company. Their main objectives focus on employee culture (a culture of innovation, accepting failing, learning from failures, as well as a culture to test things) and creating value and paving the way to new businesses.

They have a lot of initiatives in Open Innovation, such as partnering with incubators dedicated to HR (Rhizome) or sustainable mobility (Rolling Lab). They take part in a few Open Innovation programs–like DataCity in Paris–and organize learning expeditions around the world.

READ MORE: Axway and DataCity Innovation Program, a great combo.

Adopt a startup

Another Total initiative is an internal tool called “Adopt a startup” in which they share the needs of the different affiliates and businesses—qualified startups whose solutions can possibly answer these needs—and last, but not least, the “POC” (proofs of concepts or experimentations) they carry out with the startups.

With Open Innovation, the processes of the company are shaken up; they are accelerated and carried out in a more agile way. The mentalities are enriched with new ways of working and doing things.

People in the company acquire a capacity to make a leap of faith in innovation. It’s also a good way for managers to bring vitality to their teams and identify new skills. This also embraces HR and management.

As an example, they organized a digital hackathon around the use of voice as an interface between Total and their customers. About 30 international teams of three people from all departments worked together on the challenge.

READ MORE: Discover faster innovation with AMPLIFY.

Total would like to launch some new initiatives, like working and innovating with other corporations. This is why they launched the Learning Expeditions. We thank Total for the invitation. It was really a great experience.