INNOVATION SPIRIT K. Y. : Our worlds are not so far apart from one another. However, you are facing the challenges of large organisations. From the standpoint of innovation, your strength is also your weakness. Because F. M.-D. : That’s the real challenge! It is much more difficult for us than for a fully open structure like your own, which was designed from the outset to encourage creativity. Our challenge is to ensure that what unites us – our shared culture, which has made the bank strong and reliable throughout our history – does not make us indistinguishable. The answer is to cultivate diversity in every sense of the word, to recruit and train people who stay themselves, with all their differences. You told me that your students include a sociologist, a philosopher, a Tibetan monk and more. We need to be able to attract unusual profiles like theirs and to protect them by creating an environment that will allow them to help the company with their unique outlook. In this vein, at one of our locations in the Ile-de-France region, we are creating a place that will be sort of like our own technology cluster. Through discussions with our youngest employees, we have designed a living space, not just a workspace, where our sharpest thinkers will have autonomy, responsibility and, as a result, room for creativity. It's the same concept as when we help incubate startups, using the different possibilities found in our international network. That's how we'll be able to generate breakthrough innovations through our ecosystem that will create the bank of tomorrow! 37 I SOCIETE GENERALE 2013-2014 DIVERSITY CONNECTION CHALLENGE I worked with major corporations in an earlier life, including Societe Generale, I was able to see how corporate culture can be a source of strength but also how it can erase individualism. What do you do to ensure that the young people you hire remain creative? How do you preserve their ability to think differently in a highly structured framework where they might hear people say, "Yes, that's a good idea, but it's just not possible"? K. Y. : When Bitcoins came out, I wondered why you weren't using your servers to mine them yourselves. You could've. Mo r e s e r i o u s l y, though, I think that you're doing the right things to attract the young people of 42. Also, if both of us are here, it's because our cultures can find common ground and because we have things to teach each other! 42 Created and financed by Xavier Niel, the founder of Iliad-Free, with multiple partners including Kwame Yamgnane, 42 is a computer science school that began teaching students in November 2013. Tuition is free and it is open to applicants with varied profiles, whether or not they are high school graduates, as long as they are hard workers who are passionate about computer science. It has developed a community-based curriculum directly inspired by the Internet, where everyone is constantly learning from others and plays a role in evaluating everyone else, thereby allowing individual talents to lift up the entire group. This is known as peer-to-peer learning.
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