INNOVATION SPIRIT KWAME YAMGNANE Before launching 42 with Xavier Niel, Nicolas Sadirac and Florian Bucher, Kwame Yamgnane helped start up Epitech, the computer science school, and dedicated his entire career to information technology, both as an entrepreneur and within service companies. His background and empathy have instilled in him a strong social conscience. Françoise MERCADAL-DELASALLES, The experience of 42 is of great interest to me because you invented a new school founded on completely different ideas. This was a total innovation. In our own corporate universe, we know that the need for innovation has never b e e n s t r o n g e r . Driven by the digital transformation, we are undergoing massive changes that challenge our business models and practices. In a hyper-regulated work environment, we need to start a movement and transform organisations that are complicated by nature. MOVEMENT Digital technology is a challenge for your company, but for our school, it is the air we breathe. There basic logic behind the creation of 42 was that to invent tomorrow's world today, we also need a new way to train the people who will play a role in that new world. For more than a century, our educational system has been structured by the needs of the industrial world, with its scientific reasoning, its demands for production, its standards and its hierarchical system. Simply speaking, for decades the goal was to create perfectly standardised products that could be reproduced ad inf initum. With the digital economy, the challenge is not how to make three million Facebooks, but how to create a single new one. We need to think and teach differently. Technical skill is still fundamental, but in order for young people to get a handle on it, we need to move beyond the teacher-student approach. This is called computational thinking: the ability to simultaneously understand and make use of the abilities of both man and machine by combining the best aspects of both. For developers to acquire that mindset, they need to be given room for freedom and creativity that the current educational system cannot deliver. That's what we do. 35 I SOCIETE GENERALE 2013-2014 Kwame YAMGNANE, Deputy CEO, 42 CREATIVITY Group Head of Corporate Resources, Societe Generale Innovation is only meaningful if it is based on an accurate understanding of the user's needs F. M.-D. : At its core, your educational challenge is very similar to our managerial challenge. Societe Generale is of course part of the industrial world you mentioned – it was industrialists who created our bank 150 years ago. Naturally, we need procedures and people to apply them, reproduce them and test them. However, we are caught in a struggle between organisational efficiency and dynamic innovation. We need to have our system produce people who can think outside the box and take bold leaps. We have an advantage that helps us meet this challenge in that, over and above the tight restrictions of our regulatory and technical environment, we are a relationship-focused profession that stays in touch with our clients. We work for them and with them. In this new digital world we are entering, innovation is only meaningful if it is based on an accurate understanding of the user's needs. That is why I believe computational thinking cannot work without emotional CONTACT thinking, i.e., without considering how human beings feel. The more advanced our technical abilities become, the more we need to operate at that level. Likewise, my convictions and practices as a manager tell me that an individual's resources are nothing without those of the team.
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