Link Your Organization to Research

By Serge Darrieumerlou

🔶 WHY?

A CEO recently confided to me:

“I feel like I’m running after technologies I no longer understand.”

That’s precisely where everything begins: when a company realizes that its traditional weak-signal sensors are no longer enough.

Advanced technologies are moving at lightning speed artificial intelligence, biotechnology, sustainable materials, automation, clean energy.

They’re reshaping our business models, production methods, customer relationships, and partnerships.

So, how can we stay one step ahead?

How can we (re)create the vital space for anticipation?

How can we gain clarity to innovate and invest in the right direction?

How can we guide our company’s technological transition instead of enduring it?

🔶 HOW?

Being informed about new technologies is good.

Being able to anticipate them is better.

Knowing what to do with them and why is essential.

1️⃣ Connect your company to research and knowledge

The ultimate intelligence of an organization lies in its ability to learn, and that means connecting it to knowledge.

To real knowledge.

Visiting trade fairs to observe competitors’ new products? Why not.

But those products are often the result of projects started three to five years earlier.

That’s not being ahead of the curve, that’s being three years late.

Knowledge lives not only in customer insight, but also, and above all, in labs, research centers, and universities.

That’s where the technologies that will redefine your business are born.

Connecting your company to research means putting knowledge back at the heart of strategy.

It means reconnecting to the living source of progress.

It’s a leadership responsibility: to anticipate, to buy time for action, to steer investments wisely and secure the company’s future.

Behind every technology lies a new form of knowledge.

Understanding the state of the art in any given field means understanding where the next waves of innovation are heading.

And in a world where artificial intelligence accelerates innovation cycles, that connection has become vital.

The first benefit is immediate:

You introduce a new nature of information into your company’s strategic system, a first-level foresight directly from research, illuminating the transformations that will shape the next three to five years.

Why develop a version 2 of a technology destined to disappear when research is already announcing the next generation?

That’s what it means to take back agency over your future.

That’s the foundation of a real innovation plan.

👉 Example: The understanding of messenger RNA in the 1960s led decades later to mRNA vaccines — a breakthrough born from fundamental research that became a global solution.

2️⃣ Reintroduce long-term thinking: the Three Horizons approach

For these new insights not to get lost amid daily urgencies, the company must reinforce its strategic architecture.

Because when you only see as far as the end of the month or the end of the year, there’s no room left for reflection — nor for connection to knowledge.

You must learn to navigate across 3 horizons:

• Horizon 1: performance and operational excellence (1 month – 1 year)

• Horizon 2: improvement and progressive transformation (1 – 3 years)

• Horizon 3: anticipation, exploration, and questioning existing models (3 – 10 years).

These horizons don’t compete, they complement one another.

But it’s Horizon 3 that opens the space for exploration, research, and learning.

That’s where the future is built.

The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics, awarded to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, reminds us that growth doesn’t come from luck, it comes from the capacity to innovate, learn, and reinvent.

👉 This is precisely the role of a Chief Innovation Officer: structuring that Horizon 3.

That’s how I approached it when building Decathlon’s innovation platform, and later at Somfy: creating the conditions for continuous exploration capable of feeding long-term strategy, translating research into actionable levers, and surfacing transformative concepts before they become obvious.

3️⃣ Put knowledge at the service of meaning: the vision

Knowledge only has value if it serves a purpose — a vision of the future.

For research to become operational, it must be guided by new questions and a strong vision.

You don’t engage research to confirm the status quo, but to change the rules of the game.

Horizon 3 therefore requires a direction: a clear vision.

Not “What will we be in ten years?”

but “What do we want to become in ten years?”

👉 Example: Why did Elon Musk outperform NASA?

Because he asked a new question: “What if rockets could come back to Earth?”.

That single question reframed what engineers knew, revealed the limits of existing knowledge, and sparked new research programs that pushed those limits and created new knowledge. (You may love him or not but you can’t deny the power of vision and execution.)

4️⃣ Build a research-connected innovation plan

That’s how a true innovation plan is built or rather a Research & Innovation Plan.

Not a list of projects, but a living dynamic.

A Research & Innovation Plan is structured around transformation axes:

What transformative questions do we need to explore to gain the new knowledge that will enable tomorrow’s innovations?

It revolves around 2 movements:

• Explore: ask new questions, acquire new knowledge, open new research fields.

• Transform: turn those learnings into products, services, processes, or business models.

From there, clusters of projects emerge, some focused on research (creating, experimenting, understanding), others on innovation (applying, transforming, scaling).

👉 Example: At Quechua, the vision of “nomadic energy”, making hikers autonomous, led to research programs on flexible solar panels with the Swiss company Flexcell, and later with a Scottish university on textile-integrated control modules.

👉 Another example: the discovery of graphene, a one-atom-thick material, paved the way for flexible screens, sustainable batteries, and a new generation of lightweight materials.

🔶 FROM KNOWLEDGE TO ACTION:

LEARNING THROUGH EXPLORATION

The questions born from exploration become opportunities — to co-develop research programs, join consortiums, host PhD students, or simply engage in dialogue with the academic world.

The company is no longer just a technology user, it becomes a co-creator of knowledge.

This is what we at Activate Innovation call Learning Exploration:

a virtuous cycle where every project becomes a collective learning experience.

👉 Example: The French company Hemarina drew inspiration from a marine worm (Arenicola marina) whose hemoglobin carries 50 times more oxygen than humans’.

From that biological insight came HEMO₂life, a breakthrough technology that triples the preservation time of organs before transplantation.

👉 Another example: The French start-up Purple Alternative Surface tackled a crucial question: How can we de-artificialize urban soil while meeting parking needs?

At the crossroads of materials research and eco-design, they developed ultra-resistant, plantable, draining tiles made from recycled plastic.

🔶 REGAINING CONTROL OVER THE FUTURE

Connecting your company to research means accepting that the future is not written.

It’s a decision, to explore it, learn it, and build it.

At Activate Innovation, we help companies weave that link between vision and knowledge, between strategy and research, creating the conditions for research to become a driver of impact, learning, and sustainable transformation.

That’s also the essence of our work with universities and research centers: supporting their cultural evolution to make collaboration with businesses simpler, smoother, and more natural.

Because ultimately, that’s where true breakthroughs are born.

Long live Research-Driven Innovation! 🚀

🟧 What if your next innovation was born from a meeting with research?