Géraldine Doat is a manager within Framatome’s Corporate Innovation team. Her role is to support project teams by giving them access to the right methods and tools so they can efficiently advance their innovation projects. This mission places her at the heart of innovation practices within a major industrial group, where technical stakes are particularly high.
She highlights a defining characteristic of Framatome: the company is composed predominantly of engineers, for whom the technical dimension naturally takes precedence. This expertise is an asset, but it can sometimes lead project leaders to jump straight into building a solution, convinced they are doing the right thing. In such cases, projects may progress for one or two years, consume budgets, and then hit a major obstacle: once completed, teams realize that the solution has neither a market nor users. Project leaders then return to the innovation team saying, “I don’t understand—nobody wants my solution.”
It is precisely to avoid these situations that the corporate innovation team relies on the Vianeo business design method. For Géraldine Doat, this approach ensures that projects are addressed in the right order: starting by verifying whether a real need exists and ensuring that the issue goes beyond a single client request. She emphasizes this key step: understanding whether the need is widespread, legitimate for Framatome, and aligned with the group’s priorities. This confrontation with the market is often challenging for engineers, as is meeting users to capture what is not explicitly stated. Understanding the ecosystem surrounding a topic becomes essential.
The Vianeo platform and method play a decisive role here: they systematize the thought process, structure the steps, and make decision-making more rigorous. For the innovation team, this provides a clear framework shared across all projects, helping avoid blind spots and misaligned investments.
When discussing Framatome’s ambitions, Géraldine Doat notes that the group relies on six strategic innovation pillars. Three relate directly to its core business: ensuring a sovereign supply chain, developing new nuclear technologies (including SMRs), and reducing lead times to deliver EPRs within expected deadlines. The other pillars open the door to new business areas: space nuclear technologies, and medical applications, particularly around radioisotopes used in treating certain cancers.
Within the Corporate Innovation team, the primary ambition is to spread a culture of innovation. The goal is to show that everyone can innovate at their own level, regardless of their role, and to provide the necessary tools to do so. On a personal level, Géraldine Doat expresses a clear ambition: that by the end of the year, the Vianeo method and business design approach will be fully deployed and become a reflex for all innovation projects. Deployment has already begun in two business units; the aim is to progress gradually and extend the approach as teams recognize its value.
