Innovating to what's next...

La faillite de Kodak est souvent présentée comme l’illustration parfaite de la théorie de la disruption popularisée par Clayton Christensen. L’étude d'Albéric Tellier montre d’abord que Kodak n’a ni ignoré ni sous-estimé le numérique. Dès le début des années 2000, sous la direction de Daniel Carp, l’entreprise consacre près des deux tiers de sa R&D aux technologies numériques et élabore en 2003 un plan stratégique ambitieux prévoyant trois milliards de dollars d’investissements. C’est précisément ce plan qui se heurte à une opposition frontale des actionnaires.
La chute de Kodak ne s’explique pas uniquement par une incapacité managériale face à la rupture technologique, mais par l’impossibilité de déployer une stratégie de rupture dans un cadre de gouvernance dominé par des investisseurs institutionnels orientés vers le court terme.

Treize ans après avoir déposé le bilan, Kodak voit de nouveau son avenir menacé. Retour sur un cas d’école du management de l’innovation… qui a suscité beaucoup de contre-vérités.

A new neuromorphic robotic skin enables humanoid robots to sense pain, detect injury, and trigger rapid reflex responses.

L’idée, si on résume, c’est un peu de traiter le soleil comme un interrupteur. Il fait nuit, mais seulement sur une partie de la Terre. Le soleil ne s’arrête jamais de briller donc ses rayons sont toujours là. C’est une source d’énergie quasiment inépuisable pour encore cinq milliards d’années en tout cas, ce qui laisse le temps de voir venir. Les deux jeunes fondateurs de Reflect Orbital pensent qu’il ne faut pas forcément améliorer le rendement des panneaux solaires ou concevoir des batteries pour stocker l’énergie. Il suffit "juste", selon eux, d’allonger les journées.

A controversial scheme will begin to reflect sunlight to Earth with satellites next year, so that dark places can be temporarily lit for visibility or energy production. But astronomers are sceptical about the plan’s efficacy and possible scientific consequences.
US company Reflect Orbital, which aims to provide “sunlight on demand”, intends to launch its first satellite as soon as early 2026, beaming sunlight to 10 locations as part of an initial “World Tour”. The company then plans to launch thousands of satellites, equipped with mirrors spanning tens of metres, so that light can be reflected to Earth for “remote operations, defense, civil infrastructure, and energy generation.”

US deep-tech AI startup Tiiny AI has released a groundbreaking demonstration showing a 14-year-old PC running a 120-billion-parameter AI model smoothly without any internet connection.

From pipes to machine governance: how 5G and 6G turn the telco stack into deterministic coordination, trusted identity, and real time control for billions of robots

Revolut has not entered mobile communications to outperform network operators on coverage or spectrum efficiency. The company has entered the market because mobile connectivity has become another digital capability that fits naturally within a platform already handling identity, payments, subscriptions, rewards, travel, and daily financial behavior. When connectivity is viewed as software rather than infrastructure by the customer, the economics shift upstream.

At the Fangchenggang project, Walker S2 units will help border staff guide passenger queues, direct vehicles, and answer simple questions from travelers. Some robots will patrol corridors and waiting areas, watching for blocked exits or crowd patterns that might require human officers to intervene. Others will move between cargo lanes to support logistics teams, checking container IDs, confirming seals, and relaying status updates to dispatch centers. Away from the border itself, the fleet is expected to inspect steel, copper, and aluminum facilities, walking structured routes through hot industrial yards.

The robot in question ran off an internal AI agent. By exploiting a flaw in the software, the researchers were able to take over the robot while it was connected to a network, at which point the researchers had the robot use local wireless communication to spread the hack to another nearby robot that actually wasn't even connected to the network at the time. Spreading the hack from one robot to another only took a matter of minutes. Even worse, the researchers were able to issue a command for the robot to physically strike a mannequin on stage.

Impossible enfin d’évoquer cette édition sans souligner la montée en puissance des robots connectés. Le célèbre Ballie – robot sphérique jaune signé Samsung – fait parler de lui malgré ses multiples annonces reportées. Qu’il soit à nouveau sous les projecteurs ou non, la robotique domestique sera omniprésente entre aspirateurs autonomes perfectionnés et robots dotés d’algorithmes IA capables de mieux appréhender leur environnement. Les avancées autour des modèles « monde réel », censés offrir une compréhension plus fine des espaces physiques par l’IA, pourraient bien façonner les discussions cette année.

The growing demand for advanced materials, miniaturized devices and integrated microsystems calls for the reliable fabrication of complex, multiscale, three-dimensional (3D) architectures, a need increasingly addressed through light-based and laser-based processes. However, owing to the field-of-view (FOV) limitations of conventional imaging optics, existing 3D laser nanofabrication techniques face fundamental challenges in throughput, proximity error and stitching defects on the path to scaling. Here we present a scalable 3D nanofabrication platform that uses a metalens-generated focal spot array to parallelize two-photon lithography (TPL)1 beyond centimetre-scale write field areas.

Developing mechanically tough and sustainable plastics from renewable resources such as biomass may certainly give a promising solution to the replacement of petroleum-based plastics and eliminate microplastics. Here, we report a cellulose-based supramolecular plastic (CMCSP) synthesized by supramolecular “ionic” polymerization of carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) as an oxyanionic monomer and a hyperbranched polyguanidinium ion (PEIGu) as a cationic monomer. CMCSP is mechanically strong but inherently brittle. However, as highlighted in the present paper, we could overcome the brittleness issue by adding (2-hydroxyethyl)trimethylammonium chloride (choline chloride, ChCl) to CMCSP. This FDA-approved, biodegradable ionic human nutrient served as a particular plasticizer, enabling broad modulation of stiff, glassy CMCSP to a tough, flexible material and further to a soft, elastic material. We demonstrated that plasticized CMCSPChCl could be processed into a flexible plastic bag, which was mechanically tough but perfectly dissociable in seawater and closed-loop recyclable with electrolytes. Hence, CMCSPChCl never generates microplastics.

Success, no matter how small, reinforces what was done last time. There’s safety in doing it again. The return may be small, but the wheels won’t fall off. You may run yourself into the ground over time, but you won’t fail catastrophically. You may not reach your growth targets, but you won’t get fired for slowly destroying the brand. In short, you won’t fail this year, but you will create the causes and conditions for a race to the bottom.

When things go wrong for your customer, that’s when you have the best opportunity to prove how good you really are. Anyone can look good when everything is running smoothly, but your true customer service “chops” show up during a service failure.

Conventional PFAS degradation methods pose challenges as they necessitate harsh chemicals or substantial energy. The advancement of innovative, sustainable, and energy-efficient techniques is essential to facilitate the recycling of PFAS and alleviate the environmental risks associated with these substances. The recent study investigated the potential application of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanocrystals (NCs) in the process of PFAS defluorination. These NCs, recognized for their photocatalytic characteristics, can harness light to produce reactive species that break down organic contaminants. To improve their efficiency, NCs were capped with various ligands.

A new eco-friendly technology can capture and destroy PFAS, the dangerous “forever chemicals” found worldwide in water. The material works hundreds to thousands of times faster and more efficiently than current filters, even in river water, tap water, and wastewater. After trapping the chemicals, the system safely breaks them down and refreshes itself for reuse. It’s a rare one-two punch against pollution: fast cleanup and sustainable destruction.

Les systèmes de Gestion technique du bâtiment (GTB) sont souvent perçus comme une boîte noire incapable de tenir ses promesses. Cependant, en se donnant comme préalable de bâtir un socle de données propre et solide, et en adoptant une approche pragmatique et collaborative, les bénéfices peuvent être considérables.

96 $, c’est ce que coûte aujourd’hui la minute de calcul quantique chez un grand cloud provider. Le quantique n’est plus un fantasme de laboratoire : les machines sont disponibles, les tarifs clairs, les capacités démontrées. En d’autres termes, il suffit à un acteur malveillant, étatique ou criminel, d’estimer ce qu’il lui en coûterait de déchiffrer des données en sa possession et le bénéfice qu’il pourrait en tirer.

Dans tous les secteurs – industrie, banque, télécoms, sciences de la vie ou services publics – les organisations adoptent des technologies à la demande, qu’il s’agisse d’IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), de PaaS (Platform as a Service) ou de solutions SaaS (Software as a Service), intégrant l’IA générative pour renforcer leur agilité, stimuler l’innovation et accélérer la mise à l’échelle.