MYT: L’Oréal’s “loonshot”
L’Oréal launched MYT — “Make Your Technology” — on June 3, 2019, a 4.0 technology incubator for employees designed to nurture internal projects for the industry and the supply chain of the future. A model that Loonshots author Safi Bahcall would be proud of.
L’Oréal, which has developed partnerships with a range of external incubatorsfor many years, has now taken the leap and created its own incubator, MYT. MYT is devoted to the people who work for L’Oréal, with the aim of fostering, selecting, and launching ideas based on new technology. MYT is a collaborative space housed in the historic cradle of the group’s R&D facility at Aulnay-sous-Bois, where it is kitted out with the latest state-of-the-art technology as part of a network that includes specialists,start-ups, and universities. In a nutshell, MYT is a structure dedicated to crazy and not-so-crazy ideas. It seeks to avoid “solidification,” which, according to Safi Bahcall, author of the bestselling Loonshots,1 is an inevitable state when an organization has more than 150 employees.
The aim is also to create an innovative, collective dynamic and a nursery of ideas. A call for projects at the start of the year among L’Oréal’s industry andsupply chainteams in the EMEA region received over 160 responses.After a selection process involving the entire community, 14 teams of five different nationalities and from 12 European sites eventually joined MYT to incubate and accelerate their projects. But L’Oréal’s ambition doesn’t stop at helping innovative projects emerge and take off: the companywants to make MYT a model of transformation and cultivate the virtuous circle of innovation over the long run. The second MYT season will be held in September 2019 before being rolled out in Asia and America in 2020. Bahcall might be pleased with this example of Loonshot’s mindset in action.
To go further:
“L’Oréal lance le MYT, un incubateur pour favoriser l’innovation interne” by Aude Chardenon (L’Usine Digitale, 3 June 2019).
1 Loonshotsby Safi Bahcall (StMartin’s Press, 2019); summary published inBusiness DigestNo. 296, May 2019.
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