Co-innovation Lab

How can we build a sustainable and resilient world for everyone? This is one of the major challenges of the 21st century facing the academic world, businesses, local authorities and society as a whole.

To remain at the forefront of innovative research, deliver training for the jobs of tomorrow and enhance its capacity to transfer knowledge to businesses, the École nationale des ponts et chaussées has developed a co-creation space: the Co-Innovation Lab (CIL).

A simultaneous response to 2 needs

Accelerate innovation through research, thanks to cutting-edge facilities for cross-fertilization and consolidation of knowledge, data analysis, experimentation and large-scale prototyping.
Enhance the competitiveness of companies through partnership research projects that enable them to co-innovate with Ponts researchers, laboratories and scientific facilities.

What does the Co-innovation Lab offer?

1. Consolidating technological assets

Equipment and technical expertise for public and/or private research
Models and software derived from research (e.g. thesis outputs)

2. Disseminate technological expertise

Consultancy & expertise
Feasibility studies

3. Share technological risk

Joint R&D development (TRL3 -> TRL7)
Identification of use cases
Sharing of IP (or otherwise)
Technology transfer

The Build'In Platform

Spearheaded by the Navier Laboratory, whose 50 researchers and 120 PhD students and engineers are dedicated to the societal challenge of sustainable construction, Build'In's main areas of innovation are:

The construction site of the future, with issues such as taking into account the specific conditions of the construction site in order to propose automatic construction processes (such as pick and place) and robotized systems that are relevant and completely innovative for the sector.
Optimizing materials and structures, for example by experimenting with “2.0” concretes to rethink construction methods in the digital age and in the face of ecological imperatives, and building differently in a ‘personalized’ and “dismountable” way to meet the challenges of recycling and waste recovery...
3D printing construction to develop new cement-based additive manufacturing technologies for architecture and building.

The platform is equipped with its first set of state-of-the-art facilities:

A robotics hall for digital construction and cobotics, with 2 large 6-axis robots with a 2.5m range, one of which is mobile on a 10m rail;
A large-scale additive manufacturing cell;
New-generation concrete and composites development rooms.

The Mu Platform

The Mu platform, which specializes in flow simulation on road and public transport networks, was created to interact with mobility players and jointly solve traffic, service and urban planning issues. Researchers at the School have been called upon by :

Companies and network managers such as RATP, Île-de-France Mobilités and SNCF, who have called on Ponts researchers to optimize flows on public transport networks.
Service startups and vehicle manufacturers to co-innovate in fast-growing areas such as carpooling, car-sharing and on-demand shuttles.
Local authorities eager to build the smart cities and smart mobility of tomorrow.

Thanks to their simulation work, teams from the Laboratoire Ville, Mobilité, Transport (LVMT), for example, have helped to relieve congestion and improve traffic flow on the RER A, France's biggest transport line with one million passengers a day - equivalent, for example, to the entire public transport network of Greater Lyon.