Research & Innovation
Building tomorrow’s world today through sustainable innovation
Innovation at the heart of our projects
In terms of innovation, ALTEN offers a unique, multi-disciplinary and multi-sector field of investigation to all our consultants, combining engineering with digital technology and business services. Supervised by our technical and scientific experts and specialists, our consultants combine these different areas of expertise within ALTEN Labs to build innovative value propositions.
Our SMART DIGITAL initiative gives us a head start with nine main research programmes on cross-cutting themes, covering all our sectors of intervention and always perfectly adapted to our clients’ problems. Our process does not follow the top-down instructions of some marketing department, but follows a bottom-up approach in which our consultants, who listen to our customers and are experienced in their fields of business, devise our R&D projects using their diverse ranges of experience and bring their engineering skills to bear to see the projects to fruition. The quality of our innovation processes and technical support ensures that each project selected is relevant.
Supported by this internal R&D, ALTEN is continuously strengthening its environmental responsibility in the face of the climate and societal challenges to global society: more than 31% of our innovation activities each year address an ecological or sustainable environmental issue.
The dynamism of our innovation approach was recognized in Les Echos “Innovation Leader 2023” awards.
How do we develop innovative projects?
The Smart Digital Strategy
The Smart Digital Strategy combines the power and intelligence of digital data with the wealth of our business and sector experience.
Its added value is built on three fundamental pillars:
A few figures on research & innovation at ALTEN
100+
internal research
and innovation projects
100
permanent scientific staff
and technical specialists
10+
PhD students writing
scientific theses
400
consultants continuously involved
in our innovative projects
300
engineers on end-of-study
placement per year
11+
Labs worldwide
with more to come in 2023
31%+
of research & innovation activity dedicated
to sustainable development issues
ALTEN : what research process?
Using Agile and Test & Learn methods in our project management
The first creative phase is based on the scientific and business skills that our consultants have acquired on client assignments to ensure that the project suits the needs on the field and to supervise future developments.
The selected concepts are specified in conjunction with the Business Unit Directors, who can identify their potential, both in terms of developing their teams’ skills and of the innovative value proposition for their customers.
Project scoping helps the concepts to mature through illustrations of the original solution (proofs of concept, minimum viable products) and through working with scientific and technological partners to enrich and roll out the solution. It also allows the economic and technical feasibility to be studied while assessing its viability through a value-focused approach.
Our Research and innovation programmes
ALTEN LABS :
the factory for innovative projects
ALTEN Labs are flexible and agile units that implement innovative projects to respond to our customers’ challenges with breakthrough technological solutions. These have three objectives:
- Develop projects and show our clients the scope of our scientific and technological activities
- Involve ALTEN consultants in innovative projects supervised by technical experts so they can strengthen their skills and their creative spirit
- Cultivate a spirit of innovation in a research community and environment
Strategic skills developed in the framework of research and innovation projects
- Data Science
- Industrie 4.0
- Cloud & DevOps
- Networks and Telecoms
- Supply Chain
- Image processing and multi-physics modelling
- Quality
- Cybersecurity
- Artificial Intelligence (AI), embedded software and robotics
Our academic, scientific, and technological partnerships
To speed up innovation in its strategic areas of expertise, ALTEN works with innovative partners who are themselves experts in their scientific, technological and/or academic fields.
This federated ecosystem contributes directly to our research activities, either by pooling our know-how in scientific theses and collaborations and in use cases for our POCs (Proof Of Concept) and MVPs (Minimum Viable Product) or by introducing new technologies into our work.
A dozen scientific theses are in progress in our various Labs, conducted in partnership with the scientific laboratories of prestigious French engineering schools, including CentraleSupelec (FAST and LGI), Mines ParisTech (CGS and CRI), Arts et Métiers ParisTech (Lispen), Paris Dauphine (Lamsade), UTC (COSTECH), LAAS-CNRS, and IRISA.
They address a wide range of topics such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, ontologies, emotional analysis, cybersecurity, industrial engineering, and robotics.
ALTEN also supports MANINTEC (MANagement INnovation TECnologies), which is a product of Grenoble INP’s ENSE3 and each year hosts several engineering students for a semester to work on one of our innovative, sustainable environment projects. It allows these students to gain true experience of innovation in a multidisciplinary team.
During the conceptual scoping of a project, we always try to identify technology partners who will help us add value to our proposals.
Let’s take an example of the cascading industrial partnerships that we have conducted around the theme of Factory 4.0:
- On a project for prescriptive maintenance of cutting tools in production, we worked with a start-up, CARTESIAM, which has developed AI algorithms embedded in microcontrollers. As they were acquired by STMicroelectronics, we have become STMicroelectronics‘s leading European partner for their Nano Edge AI Studio and are developing our Grenoble Lab around the many applications of this promising technology,
- Our ability to grasp the challenges and benefits of our Factory 4.0 projects also convinced SIEMENS Digital Industries, the world leader in smart machines, to build a partnership with ALTEN for three joint offerings: the digital twin of the factory and prescriptive maintenance (see above, including STMicroelectronics), the digital twin of internal logistics flows and immersive 3D training for operations (with SIEMENS’s VTS – Virtual Training Solutions – offering),
- This ability to federate this innovative ecosystem has led us to sign a partnership with Bouygues Telecom Entreprises and SIEMENS Digital Industries to implement 5G technology in Factory 4.0 by combining each of the three players’ strengths.
Other partnerships are set up on more specific topics, for example:
- With the start-up Greenspector on responsible digital technology, integrated into our innovative solutions to assess the software sobriety and eco-performance of systems and IoT
- With the French Cycling Federation, to optimise the aerodynamics of high-performance riders’ postures, equipment and race strategies, gaining them a few precious seconds, by identifying useful data from their training and developing multi-criteria optimisation algorithms so they can give instructions in line with the athletes’ capabilities.
Join the adventure at the heart of Innovation