Portrait of Carole Le Solliec
What is the Five, and what is its originality for the areas of Fougères and Vitré?
The Fablab Innovation Vitré Entreprises is a 1901 law association. It is a third place created by companies for companies with very strong support from the Brittany Region, Vitré Community, and the Ille Chamber of Commerce and Industry -and-Vilaine. The originality of FIVE is to be managed, on a voluntary basis, by employees and managers of member companies with the objective of meeting the current needs of companies. For this we act on three axes:
- Pooling of technological needs between member companies, to facilitate innovation for their employees, mainly through prototyping, whether for example with 3D printing and scanning, or laser cutting.
- A coworking space to offer an efficient place and allowing the meeting between self-entrepreneurs and project leaders.
- The organization of activities linked to innovation, whether technical, technological or managerial, in the form of workshops, after-works. The objective is to acculturate participants to new developments, such as cobotics, blockchain, exoskeletons.
How does the Five become a resource space in skills for the territory?
FIVE is not a business network nor a service association but a place of exchange, sharing and collective intelligence. If our members need to use the equipment, I take care of training them to allow them to be independent and pass on these skills to other members. To illustrate, in 2019, an event with 20 volunteers who led their own workshop and then participated in others to recover new skills.
We are working on an inter-territory project in collaboration with the fablabs of Fougères, Janzé and Amanlis. We wish to open a new fablab within the UIMM of Vitré, a training organization. The will for FIVE will be to put our industrial employees in touch with today's learners who will be future employees. The objective is to frame and enhance the skills transmitted to our users with the Open Badge project. The interest for learners is that they can post this on their CV, LinkedIn, etc. Each fablab will set its skills criteria, depending on the target audiences and their uses.
And we have also developed the Innovation Tour. These are inter-company meetings, where during a company visit, a member shares with other members an innovation or a good practice so that everyone can leave with something that they can apply in their company.
We want to develop the sharing of good practices and the exchange of skills between employees of member companies.
What evolution for the cooperation of the Five with the other economic authorities of the territory?
Cooperation is a strong objective, but we have seen that it is very difficult to achieve. Collective intelligence must be put in place, and for that we must work at length upstream. We arrived at this cooperation in particular thanks to the confidence that we were able to gradually develop between the members of FIVE, and for example to make a manufacturer agree to share an innovation or a good practice with others.
Another essential element of our cooperation is the work carried out with the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Ille-et-Vilaine and Vitré Communauté. We received strong and essential support from the latter, whether through grants, mobilization of the Economic Development department to carry out market studies, or even reflect on the economic model of FIVE. We maintain exchanges of good procedures and information with the Economic Development department of Vitré Communauté in order to move forward in the same direction.
Cooperation and collective intelligence cannot potentially be reflected with a quantified return on investment. And to set up projects like our fablab, I think that the support of communities is essential both to make it exist and to keep it going.