Renault Innovation Lab – Le Square has been designed as an experimental laboratory, open to its business environment and close to the Renault and Renault-Nissan Alliance teams to make the proliferation of ideas easier. Managed jointly by Renault’s internal teams and external partners working towards a common goal, it will help to reinforce the innovation strategy of Renault and the Alliance.

After Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv, Renault chose France as the location for the third Renault Innovation Lab because the country already has 228 business incubators and 49 accelerators. The Île de France region alone has more than 3,000 startups. Moreover, Paris is ranked fourth among the most attractive world capitals for investors, who consider Paris a city conducive to advanced technology.

The establishment of Open Innovation Labs forms part of the culture and innovation strategy of the Renault-Nissan Alliance: they enable opportunities for innovation to be cultivated on the basis of an open ecosystem (startups, universities, investors) and the local economy (local authorities, community organisations, customers, the market).

These labs bring together under one roof the three pillars of open innovation: pooling knowledge (events, conferences, think tanks, meetups); creativity and innovative design methods (design thinking, Fablab); plus of course the levers of the new economy (start-up accelerators, cooperative and open methods, and platforms).

The Tel Aviv Open Innovation Lab in Israel, opened in June 2016, sets out to promote the electric vehicle and to encourage creativity focusing on the mobility of the future. It is located on the premises of the Porter School of Environmental Studies and is working in particular on the themes of the electric vehicle, aftersales, and internet security. This innovation laboratory is the result of cooperation between Renault, as part of the Renault-Nissan Alliance and the Tel Aviv Institute of Innovation in Transportation.

The Silicon Valley Open Innovation Lab in the United States, opened in 2011, was the first innovation initiative. It looked towards the ecosystem of worldwide startups and the Californian universities of Stanford and Berkeley. This lab is contributing to the research efforts of the Alliance into autonomous driving, and especially the development of Artificial Intelligence. It is developing innovative connected services in cooperation with Silicon Valley startups, and examining new approaches to mobility.