A year in the field, rethinking innovation

A year in the field!

Being an entrepreneur means being willing to put your convictions to the test against reality. A year ago, I chose to put one of my own to the test. In truth, this conviction had taken shape long before Cobelty was founded. It stems from a line of thinking that began over three years ago, fuelled by a certain intellectual frustration at questions which, in my view, were still not being asked sufficiently. Since then, projects, encounters and discussions have continually enriched it.

As this reflection progressed, an idea gradually took shape. In a world where technologies are becoming systems of systems, value creation no longer depends solely on the technologies themselves, but on organisations’ ability to synchronise dimensions that interact and evolve according to different timeframes.

That is why I often speak of a holistic approach. Not because we should consider everything indiscriminately, but because it has become essential to grasp the intersections between these different dimensions, to understand their interactions and to take into account the temporalities that structure them in order to inform decision-making. It is this conviction that led to the creation of Cobelty.

On the occasion of this first anniversary, the aim is not simply to take inventory. Rather, it is to share a perspective that this first year in the field has not called into question. On the contrary, it has profoundly enriched it.

As digital technologies become increasingly complex, organisations’ needs are no longer solely a matter of technological expertise. They are becoming increasingly capability-driven. This insight has led us to structure Cobelty’s activities around three complementary pillars:

• Cobelty Strategic Intelligence: to help make sense of technologies, their trajectories and their environment. To understand and make decisions. Particularly with regard to the landscape surrounding technological standardisation.
• Cobelty Labs: to transform this understanding into operational actions. To take action.
• Cobelty Academy: to develop human and organisational capabilities in a sustainable way. To learn, to learn how to learn, to learn how to adapt.

Artificial intelligence has, moreover, established itself as a cross-cutting capability across these three dimensions. The DreamLand™ by Cobelty® platform, developed to address our own needs and our own asymmetries, has rapidly become a key driver in enhancing our analytical capabilities.

This organisational structure was an initial hypothesis.

A year on, feedback from projects, partnerships and exchanges within innovation ecosystems has led us to regard it as an intuition validated by real-world experience. Not because it provides a definitive answer, but because it now enables us to formulate the questions more effectively.

When intersections become the real focus

Twelve projects have marked this first year.

5G-Advanced, preparations for 6G, semiconductors, processors dedicated to artificial intelligence, DDR and HBM memory and beyond, telecommunications technologies and dual-use applications, the ‘transferability’ of licensing programmes from one technology to another, and so on.

What these projects had in common was not their technological field. It was their level of complexity.

Preparing for 6G, for example, is no longer solely about technology. Preparatory work on standardisation, the near-ubiquity of artificial intelligence across all layers, intellectual property strategies, open-source communities, future regulations (current ones and their evolution) and other Acts, use cases, sovereignty issues and even geopolitical dimensions must now be addressed simultaneously.

Similarly, understanding the trajectory of semiconductors can no longer be limited to hardware architectures. Industrial investment, market concentration, supply chains, industrial policies, as well as standards, related essential patents and potential future licensing mechanisms, are becoming just as crucial.

Complexity no longer lies in each of the dimensions mentioned. It arises from their intersections. But it becomes truly difficult to grasp because these intersections constantly give rise to new interactions.

• Regulatory changes influence technological directions,
• Technological advances alter intellectual property strategies,
• Geopolitical tensions reshape industrial investment,
• A standard opens up or closes off market opportunities.

Every decision affects the entire system.

Temporality: an often underestimated dimension

Another observation has gradually become apparent. The issue is not one of categorising innovation as short-term or long-term, or of pitting different time horizons against one another.

• The various dimensions mentioned above do not evolve according to the same timeframes.
• Technologies follow the rhythm of research and development cycles,
• Standards are developed at the pace of consensus,
• Investments are made within multi-year frameworks,
• Regulations respond to political timeframes, shaped by democratic debates and societal expectations,
• Markets, finally, driven by usage patterns, can accelerate abruptly… or take a long time to emerge.

This desynchronisation is not new, but it is becoming a major challenge.

Nor is the question one of starting with technology (‘technology push’) or the market (‘market pull’). It is about making decisions today whose effects will sometimes only become apparent a decade later, in an environment where all components evolve at different rates. Foresight thus ceases to be merely an exercise in projection. It also becomes a capability that enables us to bring coherence to disparate trajectories in order to inform present-day decisions.

From Capacities to Capability Architectures

In light of these considerations, this first year has also led us to clarify three concepts that underpin our thinking regarding several client projects, as well as Cobelty’s own trajectory.

• A capacity is an organisation’s ability to understand, decide, act and learn within a given context.
• A capability architecture refers to the set of capacities mobilised to achieve a specific objective.
• A capability architecture is the way in which these capabilities are designed, orchestrated and developed over time, taking into account their interactions, interdependencies and timeframes.

This distinction is far from theoretical. As technological investments become more substantial and decisions have an impact over increasingly long time horizons, capability architectures are becoming a key driver of risk management, resilience and value creation. From this perspective, capabilities can no longer be viewed as exclusively internal. They are distributed amongst companies, laboratories, standardisation bodies, industrial partners, open-source communities, academic stakeholders and technologies capable of augmenting human capabilities.

It is this logic that we refer to as the ‘exosystem’.

Cobelty’s ambition is not to centralise all areas of expertise. It is to help design and orchestrate these capability architectures alongside our clients and partners.

An ongoing process of exploration

This first year has not provided any certainties. It has yielded observations, reinforced an intuition and raised new questions, all of which represent new perspectives and opportunities.

The numerous discussions held in recent weeks — from Quantum France to VivaTech, from the NATO/STO Advanced Connectivity Forum to the France 6G, Images & Réseaux and Photonics Bretagne events — show that these challenges extend far beyond any single technological sector or industrial sector.

More broadly, they challenge the way we innovate, invest, cooperate and, ultimately, build organisations capable of navigating a world that has become profoundly systemic.

We will be continuing this discussion in the autumn, as Cobelty will have the pleasure of speaking on 3 September at the Images et Réseaux cluster’s techno-conference dedicated to the resilience of critical infrastructures. Beyond the technological aspects, we will address a topic that we now consider essential: that of capabilities, their organisation and their role in the resilience of complex socio-technical systems.

In the meantime, this first year has left us with one simple conviction: as technologies become systems of systems, innovation, too, becomes a matter of systems and capability architectures.

Innnovating through intelligence. Intelligence through strategy.