Stretch Your Business, our European innovation programme

Disruptive technologies (such as Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Chatbots, BlockChain…) are playing an increasingly prominent role in our daily lives and it is getting more difficult to do without them. Companies need by all accounts to assimilate and integrate these innovations into their development strategies. Obviously, this is a major challenge and not an easy one to approach.

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions’ answer is called Stretch Your Business.

Stretch Your Business is an innovation program serving a clear purpose: to foresee the potential of disruptive technologies in order to make them part of our business development.

We thus built a 3-step process:

• April – June 2018:

Jam Sessions (creative 48-hour sessions, a kind of “innovathon”) are organized in the main countries where BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions operates.  Their goals are to select concrete use cases out of a particular technology, which could be used within the entire Group.

• July – October 2018:

An incubator will help the best use cases in each country to mature, through development and benchmarking, so that a first prototype could emerge.

• 12-16 November 2018:

Finally, a Bootcamp will bring together 6 projects that are at their most advanced stage with a clear objective in mind : developing them in an MVP format(2) over a week in Paris. At the end of the 5 days, these MVPs will be tested live by our partners (on the business side) or by our teams (on the efficiency side). The goal is to analyse the coherence and the reuse potential of these projects vis-à-vis the transformation plan of the company.

(1) Bootcamp: creative session dedicated to an application development… (see Hackathon)
(2) “Minimum Viable Product”: to get quickly a value-added solution