By boarding augmented intelligence and energy efficiency at the heart of its technological projects, b<>com enhances its strategy for the coming years. And its priority remains to provide solutions to its industrial members' challenges. Thierry Lucidarme, Executive Director of Strategy, Innovation, and Performance at b<>com, takes stock.
How does IRT b<>com define its strategy with its investor members?
Since its creation, b<>com has built its strategy and vision alongside its industrial members. After more than ten years, our skills have evolved, as has our technological environment. Therefore, it was only natural to carry out an in-depth strategic exercise with our members by asking them about the 2025-2030 period to protect ourselves collectively. This exercise highlights their priority issues. By running projects that meet our industrial partners' identified needs and enriching them with academic expertise, the IRT is genuinely serving the competitiveness of the industry's sectors.
The diversity of our industrial partners and the IRT's cross-disciplinary approach mean that our digital technologies can be put to the best possible use in various applications and fields. This is a real asset. Moreover, b<>com leverages these technologies with our customers to meet similar needs.
How would you define the new DNA of b<>com?
As announced last year at the launch of our Ambition 2035 roadmap, the IRT continues to move forward to become a reference in its ability to reconcile research, innovation, and sustainable development. Moreover, b<>com integrated the trend over the past ten years towards augmented intelligence*, as well as the necessary contribution of digital technologies to the energy efficiency of industrial processes.
b<>com maintains its historical signal, content, and network processing activities. Backed by our mastery of secure information technologies (cloud, cybersecurity, and infrastructure), they are enriched by two new disruptive factors that are now unavoidable: augmented intelligence and energy efficiency, which complete the pillars of our innovation strategy.
* Alternative conceptualization of AI, focusing on AI's assistive role (decision support), emphasizing that cognitive technology is designed to enhance human intelligence rather than replace it.
b<>com's new DNA: putting secure information technologies at the service of signal, content and network processing with a view to increased intelligence and energy efficiency.
Augmented intelligence, energy efficiency: the lens of b<>com's transformation?
Thanks to its cross-disciplinary positioning, b<>com can integrate artificial intelligence in all its dimensions. This is at several levels and in very different technologies, for example, by incorporating it into video processing hardware to optimize the allocation of computing tasks in the cloud or to locate mobiles in xG systems. This augmented intelligence is a crucial lever for improving energy efficiency.
Indeed, AI can reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced by industrial processes or even digital technologies. I'm thinking here, for example, of the digital twin, which models system deficiency as early as possible, and of frugal AI algorithms. b<>com has developed an awareness of the potential energy performance gains of its innovations and now wishes, with its members active on the subject, to increase the effectiveness of its solutions on these aspects.
Together, augmented intelligence and energy efficiency create a dimension of augmented efficiency, which renews the value proposition of IRT b<>com's historical competencies.
What synergies with the b<>com ecosystem fit into this strategy?
Thanks to its cross-disciplinary positioning, b<>com has always been committed to developing collaborations and use cases across many sectors. On the local level, we've always worked with the Images et Réseaux ecosystem. Still, we also have links with ID4Mobility on mobility issues. We'd also like to assess our ability to help the agri and agro sectors in connection with the Brittany Region.
On a national scale, France 2030 is encouraging all the FIT's institutes associations (French Institutes of Technology) to join forces around emblematic programs or major projects. We have developed close ties with the IRT St Exupéry and launched the Connectivity Alliance with it, focusing on the challenges of the land-sea-air continuum. We're also working to forge closer ties with certain Instituts de la Transition Energétique (ITE), with some exciting announcements in the pipeline.
