The Future of Innovation: AI, Simulation & Product Development

0:00Welcome back to The Serial Entrepreneur. I'm your host, Anna Wood. In today's episode, I speak with Frédéric Vacher, the Head of Innovation and 3D Experience Lab at Dassault Systems. We discuss 3D Experience Lab and the support it offers startups, the importance of connecting startups with the industry, and taking risks on early stage projects that can change the world. Let's dig in. Hi, Frédéric. Welcome to the podcast today. How are you doing?

0:26Frédéric Vacher:Hi, Anna. Very well. Thank you. Good. So to begin every podcast episode, we have our signature icebreaker question, which is what is your favorite breakfast cereal and why? So every morning I drink coffee, obviously, fresh orange juice on the bread, butter on the homemade jam. Homemade jam is very important for me. I'm picking myself the fruits. What flavor jam? Delicious. Yeah, I can imagine. What flavor jam do you have? Blueberries. I love blueberries. So every summer I go into the mountains and I'm picking blueberries. So it's really a pain, but it's really delicious. Yeah, that sounds amazing.

1:11So would you be able to introduce yourself and tell me a bit about your background?

1:15Frédéric Vacher:So I'm Fred Vacher. I'm working for Dassault Systems, Head of Innovation, since more than 30 years now. My background is a mechanical engineer. I started with an aircraft rafale prototype with Dassault Aviation a very long time ago. Then I joined Matra working on software for industries at that time. I spent a lot of time in Japan, living in Tokyo. Then Paris, I joined Dassault Systems to start building their partnership ecosystems. working on managing partners like software editors, then services companies on technology, on IT. Then I spent 10 years to work on corporate development, on the partnership on M &A.

2:06Frédéric Vacher:And 10 years ago, I created the 3D Expans Lab, which is an open innovation laboratory of their systems with the aim of strongly impacting the society. And I'm still there. I'm still growing this ecosystem, full of startups, makers, and passionate people willing to change the world. Perfect. Could you tell us a bit more about 3D Experience Labs and what you're trying to achieve there? You know, at Desso Systems, we are the world leader in industrial AI, industrial software, where everything around you is virtualized in a virtual twin with our solutions. So we're talking of plane, cars, bottle of shampoo, your table or chairs, your smartphone, your PC or whatever.

2:50Frédéric Vacher:We have more than 400 ,000 customers, very big like Boeing, Toyota Motors, Boston Dynamics, very small like startups. We even have a maker offer so that you can online get access to our software solutions on platform to design your own stuff and make them in your fab lab. So it's very broad. And we cover 11 industries. aerospace, transportation, mobility, energy, consumer packaged goods, high tech, life science, which is a very important industry for us. It's our second biggest market. And with all these industry jobs, we are helping them to innovate, incremental innovation most of the time because they are their legacy.

3:35Frédéric Vacher:And we keep them state of the art by providing best of class solutions, not only in design engineering but the simulation manufacturing production uh on all that on the on the secured on cloud platform um what we do is uh doing the innovation spiral in the virtual world from an id to a product on the market and this is true for an airplane or a car where you need to design engineer up to certification testing crash test for instance for cars or getting fa approved and And this is true also for a molecule. It's at a different scale, nanoscale, but you need also to drive discovery, analysis, design, certification in silico, and clinical trials.

4:21Frédéric Vacher:And for you to know, we have a complete solution to go end-to-end in the virtual world. And something like 70 % of the private clinical trials on the market, global market, are done with our platforms. So Moderna and BioNTech, you know those guys very well now after COVID. They were biotech working with us in the past and successfully operated their clinical trials remotely, aggregating a cohort of patients remotely and operating all those data to be in a very record time clinical trial their molecules. So that's their system. With the Friedrich-Kahn's lab, what we aim to do is to prepare the next generation of entrepreneurs.

5:06Frédéric Vacher:We believe that in the next 20 years, coming years will have a metamorphosis of the industry. What does it mean is all the industrials are willing to operate differently with few points. First, our planet is limited. These natural resources are limited. So they will have to reduce their impact and optimize what they do with those, I would say, the best options. So reducing the impact globally for economic reasons, for ecological reasons, and for The possibility reason is very important. And with AI, we bring them a lot of simulations to reduce their impact. Maybe you don't know, but when you design a product, whatever it is, your headset on your head, 80 % of the impact is defined at the engineering phases.

5:57Frédéric Vacher:So engineers at their desk are deciding for the entire life cycle of the product. And usually it's products that are produced massively. So the impact is huge. Taking this and that materials, doing this design or that design, manufacturing in that country or in another world, producing at this number of countries. So all this is obviously generating an impact, but now we can simulate and we provide algorithms so that the clients, the customers can arbitrate if they wish. So that's very important. And with the 3X1 Lab, we go one step further. is we take very early stage projects that would really change the world.

6:39Frédéric Vacher:So we take risks. We go into unknown domains and we help them from their ID to their product to market. Either at the pitch level, we are providing them a lot of coaching with experts that we take from our company because it's also an important fact of Dassault Systems is we are a software company, we are a cloud and AI company. We have a lot of developers and with AI, obviously, we automate all these factories. We have 80 labs located in different countries, so they all work together for long now into this type of framework. On all those guys, they are having two competencies. They are obviously IT and developer guys.

7:26Frédéric Vacher:They know how to write down code, but they know an industry domain. They're experts in aerospace, composite material. We have doctors, soldiers. And they have this mixed and balanced competencies, which makes it very powerful because what we do at Dasuistam is we provide virtual twin on software solutions to virtualize the real world, not a metaverse, but everything you do with us is scientifically compliant to the reality, which is quite difficult. We help them, with those experts, making sure that the ideas mature and conciliated. We saw this project from different angles. We bring maybe other partners.

8:14Frédéric Vacher:The real value is also we can connect with the industry. 400 ,000 customers worldwide is huge. and there is one player, us, capable to do this. So it's a huge value. We provide them software on platforms so that they can start with an industry-leading software platform for free. And we provide them the experts to help them. And when you are a deep tech starter, the real difficulty is not to have the idea, is not to build your deck and raise money, although it's need to have a good pitch. It's really to go from a prototype to industrialization. So this is really hard. Some are saying it's very hard to do hardware.

8:55Frédéric Vacher:It's very hard to do deep tech. And you know you have this dev valley that very few can cross. And why very few can cross is because if you are not taking up front the manufacturing constraints, the certification constraints of what you are building, you are failing because you need to redo everything and then you don't have any cash to do this. So the real value is mentoring to help them thinking about what would be their constraints to anticipate and do we try the first time. And it's very difficult because when you are an early-stage startup, you don't think your 10-year development plan. You know, if you think six months or a year is already very good.

9:38Frédéric Vacher:But if you don't think about industrialization, which material I will use to do this cover of this product, which manufacturing processes I will use, Is it plastic injection? Is it additive manufacturing? Is it whatever? Then you don't do the right design and engineering. And if you don't do the right engineering, you sell. Same for certification. Any product to market needs to be certified at one point. Usually it comes maybe eight years or ten years after you start your company. So it's a very long time for us. But if you are not compliant with your regulations, you obviously don't put your product to market.

10:14Frédéric Vacher:So you fail. So this is the 3D Translabs Lab in a nutshell. We provide one-to-one dedicated support to the very happy few that really changed the world. And it's not only about software or platform. It's really about people, skilled people on AI that augment people to bring the right information, the right decision at the right time. We work very closely with our startup program. where here, with an online approach, with a community support approach, we interact with thousands of startups. For you to know, we interact with 27 ,000 startups worldwide. So it's huge. So any startups doing anything are welcome to join this program.

11:00Frédéric Vacher:You just need to be early stage. So obviously, if you raised already$500 million, it's too late and it's very good for you. But if you are very small, we like helping those entrepreneurs because that's very important. But now, the system is a big company. We were a startup 40 years ago. It's our turn to help. And we are really keen to help those entrepreneurs to success. Great. Are there any particular industries, like startups that work in particular industries that you're particularly interested in? Basically, as I said, we cover a lot of industries. So whatever, they are in life science, medical device, biotech, or energy and mobility, whatever.

11:43Frédéric Vacher:They work on nuclear fission. They work on green energy, on mobility, cars, bikes, whatever. They all are welcome. With the lab, we look for people that can change the world. So sometimes it's crazy idea. It's really disruptive innovation. Something that has never been done before. were eager to take risks to identify potential new possibilities that Tandar Industrial cannot do because he has his own legacy, he has his own business model, and he cannot take risks like this. So, for instance, I'll give you an example. The future of mobility seen by an automotive carmaker is usually a car, whatever, they are hydrogen, electric, or whatever, with four wheels on a chassis.

12:28Frédéric Vacher:But maybe it's an exoskeleton. and you need to look at this world with fresh eyes and it's really what we expect to do at the Free Expansed Lab. So for startups that are having crazy ideas that want to change the world, we are happy to enter in contact, obviously. What we do is, you know, you remember 10 years ago, United Nations edited 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It was a good mapping of what are our challenges, us, humans, in front of our life, whatever it is in health and healthcare, education, pollution, ocean. So if you can act in one or two of those sustainable development goals, we are your partner to help you.

13:16Perfect. So what role does 3D Experience Lab play within Dassault Systems?

13:22Frédéric Vacher:We are the art of Dassault Systems. We are corporate and global. means that the lab is a physical place in Paris, in Munich, in Boston, in Pune, in India, in Shanghai, and in Brazil as well. And those physical hubs connect with the ecosystem, the local ecosystem. We are an open lab, so we partner with incubators. So if you're an incubator in deep tech, you are also welcome because we want to help startups that are located into those incubators. and we work with all DASO systems with a new governance and a new framework. It means that the lab is not a team with a boss, myself working a side. The lab is everyone.

14:05Frédéric Vacher:Everybody at DASO system can spend 10 % of his job on a volunteering basis to work and support labs projects. It means that from the CEO to the developer, everyone can bring his skills by passion to help. And that's a real powerful community mindset that leverages collective intelligence and that brings the real novel needed for the project, whatever the project is. So obviously, I'm not asking my colleagues, you know, we have 25 ,000 people worldwide in 130 countries. So, for instance, we have our material science experts based in San Diego on the West Coast. I won't ask them, those guys, to travel.

14:49Frédéric Vacher:I don't know in Munich if I have a project about new materials in Munich. And it's a real story because we support Strong By Form in Munich. They want to do composite materials from wood fibers, doing very light material, as efficient as aluminum. So those guys, those experts, they are located in San Diego. And thanks to the cloud, thanks to our Freelix platform, we can connect them to the team, work collaboratively into the projects, on their own virtual space without any travel. So that's a real way to connect, being very efficient and not impacting too much the planet. How do you think 3D Experience Labs differs from other corporate startup kind of partnerships?

15:37Frédéric Vacher:It's very different. First, it's not a CVC. We invest to intelligence and potentially kill the startup. We do not invest. So we do not take any idea. What we do is we help them to success from an idea to industrialization with the bet that they will be successful and that they will become the system partner on customer. So we are catering the next generation of entrepreneurs, the next gen of Boeing, the next gen of Tesla, the next gen of Procter and Gamble in all those domains in order to orient, in a way, the next gen of the industries. That's very unique. We are probably the only one to do this.

16:24Frédéric Vacher:And we are very serious with the support that we are providing. It's not just for fun or for communication. It's really for generating impact on inspiring the next gen of the industry. if I have for instance in the lab we have now several projects that are in operation on the market we have a solar autonomous drone the guys flies only with the Sun so absolutely no impact no pollution no noise so obviously we are not transporting people not passenger aircraft it's for monitoring and so it's already a huge drone it's six meters wide you can embark different sensors depending on the mission and you can follow pipelines to identify leaks or follow electric lines to identify failures or follow a coast we identify your potential pollutions or whatever but now in production nowadays we have a lot of forest fires for instance those drones could fly for very long potentially identify very early stage uh fire so that when you are answer on you you fight those issues you anticipate and obviously if you can fight very early stage you avoid any big disasters that's that's the idea on doing so when we have our customers coming like our bus are Boeing we are sharing those projects and we try to connect those small guys with big industries.

18:01Frédéric Vacher:That's very important if we want them to scale. A startup, they have a crazy idea. They can't go fast. They are very agile, but they don't have any production system. The big guys, they have big production systems, very optimized, but they are having difficulties to be agile, to start from a blank page because they are having their legacy. Connecting the two is very important for the success of both parts, by the way. and this is a real way to re-industrialize territories by bringing the crazy new ideas with a product change system which is already in place that you can reshape. So how do you define success for 3D Experience Labs?

18:45Frédéric Vacher:The success is just like I said with this example when the projects are bringing value and are selling obviously we have a business model So obviously at the end, but it's very important for us to connect economics and ecology. You won't change the behavior of people. You won't change our impact. We're doing all of us on the planet without a business model and economic incentives. That's demagogy and nobody succeeds. But if you can bring and show that there is a new economic, a new business model and in the same time this new economy leads us to better protect our environment so when I'm saying better protect our environment, it's better protect our lives because you are drinking water, you are smithing the atmosphere, the air and we need to protect all this as you know in some part of the world it's getting more and more difficult to bring clean weather in some part of the world the heat temperature are getting so high that it becomes difficult to live in so it's a society issue so we can say we don't want to hear about this it's not in my background but we can say collectively we can find options and technology is here to help we can burn compute to produce prompts with gpt that's good but we can burn compute to find solutions for a better world.

20:23Frédéric Vacher:It's really what we aim to do at the first time. Yeah, great. So with so much experience working with startups, what do you think are the biggest challenges that founders are facing today compared with five to ten years ago? The big challenge is going to production, as I said. In a geopolitical situation that is changing and moving every day, we see that the countries are adopting different regulations, different strategy. Your old partners are maybe not the future partners. I would say in the past, it was quite easy to develop a new product, put your production in China, put your data in whatever platform, and you could grab a part of the value of all this.

21:11Frédéric Vacher:Now, most of the countries, America, Europe, wants to re-industrialize. So it means that you need to do it by your own. And doing it by your own is a completely different story. And it has to be done as an ecosystem strategy within your country, taking into account sovereignty, taking into account cybersecurity to protect your IP. Because obviously, even if you are a startup, your IP is very important. I give you an example. You are working as a startup in nuclear fusion. it's far more easy for a bad guy to attack you than to attack the big corporates, the big industries. So you are at risk and you need to protect you as it was a big company protecting my asset.

21:58Frédéric Vacher:So that's a real new challenge that was not happening I would say in the past where most of those ecosystems were kind of naive, believing in a kind of global world friendliness, which is probably not anymore the case, or at least your partners are different. Second, with Gen.ai, you see a lot of new stuff coming. Obviously, it's not mature yet. We are still at the emphasis of all this, but it will really bring some new way for entrepreneurs to grow and to develop. If I get rid of the buzz, many people are saying many things on this thing. And at the same time, what we are investing in is AI that you can trust, where there is no place for hallucination.

22:49Frédéric Vacher:So that when you have an answer about, I don't know, designing something for a slide or designing something for medical or analyzing medical imaging, there is no place for hallucination. So this is our real challenge to leverage those technologies. is we are doing a lot of AI, like computer vision, like deep learning, obviously, like any big players. And this LLM, which is kind of probabilistic AI, I would call them like this, are bringing some new stuff, especially in life sciences, by itself, to discover new molecules, which is a good topic for us. But it has to be well-framed, protecting customer data, protecting customer IP, protecting for hallucination on a virtual companion that you can trust.

23:43Frédéric Vacher:Virtual companion that is doing things for you, not just telling you what to do, but doing things for you. So there are very few players like us who can really do this because we own the solvers and the modelers. We own the data model, which has been engineered for years. and our customers are owning their own data and we are providing them the platform to host and secure those data with different options. By the way, it could be on-prem, it could be on private clouds and in different countries with different partners for you to operate in a safe way. So that's also a new challenge for entrepreneurs.

24:20Frédéric Vacher:And finally, the third one, as I said, is if you want to grow, you need to industrialize and industrialization is very difficult and it cannot be done using a child GPT or whatever, a Gemini. Industrialization means having factories to operate or partners having factories to operate. So it means understanding the physics, understanding the materials, understanding the production systems to think right the first time. And that's a real challenge, especially in the hardware industry. Very few startups succeed. to go over those challenges. And this is where we can play a role. And in the past, every startup was using such a product, solidworks, on their own, on their desktop.

25:10Frédéric Vacher:So they were isolated. They were doing as best as they could, but they had no way to connect with the rest of the industries. On thanks to a platform approach, thanks to community approach, we can connect the dots and help them to succeed. That's really the bottom line. This is really our interest on the startup interest. When both startups, very small entity, large system, big company, when both are having a common interest, then you have a road to success. Great. So what startups have been through the lab have particularly inspired or excited you? We have a lot. And it's difficult to choose because, as I said, we are following the 17 SDGs.

25:54Frédéric Vacher:We have a lot of challenges in front of us. whatever it's a clean energy it's a fighting cancer is a passion specific prosthesis to better help the surgery and better repair the patient so we have a lot i told about exercise flying with the sun it's huge we have a great project on putting the patient into a radiotherapy treatment so i teleport the patient into his treatment in virtual reality so that he understands how it works. He understands the protocol. And when the real treatment happens, he's not having any fear. So he's relaxed. And when you are distressed, the treatment goes better. So it's a way to use virtual reality on virtual worlds for good and not just for entertainment like some companies are willing to push.

26:44Frédéric Vacher:In the US, we have a lot of projects like Maglevero, like Lift Lab. It would be a small project, but very unique. Down on the east coast, close to Boston, young guys identify a real problem with whales who are dying because of cables from the fishermen on ropes. So they created a smart lobster trap so that it removes any ropes and it connects when it's down under the sea to the guy in the boat. And this is a way to capture lobster without killing animals. So that's for us very, very impactful. Even if it could see as a kind of niche solution, it really solves a problem. And it's really what we want to do is solving an issue.

27:30Frédéric Vacher:We have a project which is still an early stage of a device that a serger can use to detect real time if there is still a cancer cell. so you know when you are having a cancer the surgeon may remove the the cells with surgery so he uses a lot of medical imaging to prepare then you go in the operating room he's doing the surgery and then when he believes that everything is is removed then if some small cells are still there, then it goes to a problem maybe two or three years after. Having a device that can give the soldier in real time a feedback of, okay, clean anything or be careful there is still a zone where you may have cancer cells.

28:20Frédéric Vacher:For me, it's also a great innovation that would save lives. It's really what we aim to do. We have great projects in new materials with strong by form. with a wooden composite Tyson, or in nuclear fusion with Proxima fusion in Germany. All our portfolio is online, 3DXMonsLab.com, and you can access to all those innovations through a virtual world that is accessible either through your iPhone on the App Store. Download the 3DXMonsLab app. It's free, and you can put a virtual world around you in augmented reality. Or online on the website, you can navigate into this virtual world, interacting with the virtual twin of each of those innovations, which is a kind of extension of our physical lab.

29:08Frédéric Vacher:The good thing is it's available everywhere on this planet, every time with any device. So that's huge. And it's also the systems to provide a virtual world on virtual twin solutions for industries, but also for everyone who wants to understand what are those innovations. So it's a kind of new museum of science on innovation that is available as a virtual world online. Yeah, those startups sound really exciting. There's a lot of innovation going on right now that is actually truly changing the way humans are going to live like in the next couple of years. Definitely. So what advice would you give to founders that are trying to build technology that can have a lasting impact?

29:53Frédéric Vacher:Think big, obviously. think like if no barriers were around you. That's usually the case by American young guys, by the way, because I guess the education system is training them into this direction. It's not the case in Europe where people are more timid, I would say. They are more shy. And in Asia, in India, they are growing a lot. And more and more, we see entrepreneurs from India thinking big from global innovation to real deep tech. So that's great. So think big. Think ecosystem. Who are your key partners? Who are really helping you, not killing you? So that's very important. Not only in terms of investment, but in terms of scientific advisor.