Brand Marketing

By Nelsy Rodriguez - October 16th, 2015

Our European correspondent Nelsy Rodriguez gives us the update on Europe's most impressive tech developments across industries.

With the “Digital Law Project” officially published on September 26th, digital innovation has become a critical success factor for the French government to optimize services and promote industrial progress. 

On Tuesday (Oct.13th) we had the opportunity to attend to the second edition of "Les Trophées des Industries Numériques 2015" organized by L’Usine Digitale (a French journalism authority in technology).

Among the main sponsors were HP and Airbus (AIR:Euronext Paris). The guests of the night were the CDOs, Innovation Directors, and Product Managers from Air France, Orange, Bosch, Merck, ERDF, and companies making a noticeable impact in digital innovation.

Here are some of the highlights of the evening:

IoT

Orange, the leading French telecommunications company, is expecting to launch their IoT platform with a return up to 600 M€ for the next 3 years, thanks to the LoRa™ Alliance or LoRaWAN (Long Range Wide-area network) with partners such as HP, IBM and Cisco, moving fast towards the development of smart cities.

They were awarded as this year’s Digital Service Award with their device Pops, which allows you to connect any object to a digital network (from bikes and parcels to pets and beyond).

CMA-CGM won the Digital Supply Chain Award, they have recently shipped the first fully-connected container facing the power difficulties of being on-board.

3D printing + Connected Objects

RCup got the award for “Conception of the Year”, for creating 3D printed, custom-made connected insoles and other wearables, useful for industrial workers and athletes.

In July, Bain & Company released their report on 3D printing strategy, revealing the pros (quick production, lightweight, any shape) and cons (high costs, context, unreadiness) but it’s an industry with double-digit growth in the next 2 years. 

Digital Marketing

Criteo (NASDAQ:CRTO) published their report “Mobile Dominates the Path to Purchase”, in which they expose that order values from mobile apps are almost 20% higher than those from desktop browsers.

In the pharmaceutical industry, Merck launched an app that reduces the number of communication layers between veterinarians, which will allow them to obtain data faster for use in a lab environment to predict epidemic frameworks.

On the other hand, digital merchandising is gaining relevance:
The digital marketing award of the year was given to Passionata, a French Lingerie brand who developed a virtual reality game in which customers could interact with a model wearing their products.

HR Information Technology Resources

IT systems for Human Resources is a huge growth area at the moment. This year’s winning startup was Clustree, a company using Big Data to help talent managers match jobs with the best candidates.

Services

La Poste was chosen as the Digital Company of the Year. The French postal service (which also provides banking and other services) developed a delivery system called “Facteo”, which uses a Samsung Galaxy S4 to simplify their process and make it paperless.

CDO

The memorable quote of the night was “without electricity, there’s not much technology going on”
The award for Smart Boss of the Year went to Christian Buchel, the Chief Digital Officer of Electricité Réseau Distribution France (ERDF). He is also Vice Chairman of EDSO4SG, the European distributor of smart grids system operators. High tech services’ electricity consumption is enormous, but Europeans have an eye on reducing it.

The CDO position is relatively new to companies in Europe, comes with the heavy responsibility of leading the digital transition internally. Expertise, boldness, and passion are the key qualities for success in this role.

Companies such as these are deciding France’s economic future by investing in its core industries: Aerospace, Telecommunications, Luxury, Pharmaceuticals and Public Services. With the fast pace of digitization across the public and private sector, the two are working as allies to invest in technology as an engine of economic growth across industries.