Open innovation with beauty start-ups

Interview with Esohe Omoruyi, Senior Vice-President Digital – Open innovation and Digital services

What does « Open innovation » mean ?

Open Innovation at L’Oreal is a dynamic mix of bringing external ideas and internal ideas together to fuel the Group’s innovations and digital technologies.This means that we create partnerships with companies which will inspire our creation process and where we can also reciprocate by providing our leading and vast expertise in beauty.We work with expert partners as part of this Open Innovation process- and we also have an ecosystem of early stage companies that are part of our work with accelerators and incubators.

What are the digital partnerships developed by L’Oréal ?

  Station F is the accelerator for L’Oreal which focuses on incubating indie beauty brands and beauty technology in order to help accelerate their businesses. L’Oreal will occupy space in Station F – which is the largest digital accelerator in the world – and we help these Founders build their brands. L’Oréal is the first consumer goods company to start a partnership with Station F.

Partech Ventures is one of the largest transatlantic VCs in the world. They have global teams and a footprint that extends from SF to Paris to Berlin and Africa. Our work with Partech is highly specialized on sourcing growth stage companies that can help us to seize technologic opportunities.

Founders Factory is a London based accelerator and incubator that we started to partner with to help us connect with early stage companies which are dirsrupting the digital marketing landscape. We’ve already piloted proof of concepts with over 8 startups that work across fields such as social influencer management, online to offline measurement, and sampling.

In what extense is it a win-win bet for the 2 parts ?

 We learn from the startups about new technologies and agility.

The startups receive a supportplan based on their business and they can have access to our brilliant minds in product development, R&I, operations and marketing. It also brings the opportunity for many startups to consider Beauty as a way to build their business and grow.