The motto for this year’s Euronaval trade fair is “From the sea, protect our nations”. Open Innovation and Industrial Partnerships Director at Naval Group, Simon Payet explains, “Given the current geopolitical context, it is vital to step up the pace even further and rapidly integrate the latest innovations on board. At this stage, working as an extended enterprise is a prerequisite to successfully accelerating our developments. Naval Group has solid experience in this regard. This translates into the creation of trust-based relationships, protected by partnership agreements”. Simon Payet and his team will no doubt prove this point during our participation at Euronaval in the SEAnnovation space. They will be putting the spotlight on several innovative start-ups in the field, with whom Naval Group is already carrying out projects and experiments, or which the group has identified as highly promising. “One of our objectives is to further the dynamic at work within this ecosystem”.
Naval Group also has partnership agreements with universities, laboratories, SMEs and large groups. Over thirty are presently listed in the group (representing around 120 projects), in disciplines as varied as additive manufacturing, optics/optronics, data, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum mechanics, energy storage and so on. “If I take the future example of new-generation aircraft carriers (PANG), this ship accommodates an entire city, an airport, a nuclear reactor and an ammunition depot. The sum of technological needs is therefore fairly consequential”, underlines Simon Payet. “Our mission is thus to source and identify the best partners to help us to fulfil our technological strategic plan which also serves as our R&D and innovation roadmap. These answers to needs expressed by Naval Group do not all fall within the framework of a partnership agreement. Certain may translate into off-the-shelf solutions purchased from our suppliers or even from companies in the civil sector. At my end, I handle co-innovation with around ten partnership managers who themselves are in touch with all the R&D and innovation teams in the group”. Our close-knit network and structured organisation ensure that we stay on top of future technological bricks.