Building the Vision
To build the Vision of our Corporate Garage project, we were inspired by initiatives from other companies, videos, and articles we came upon. We share below some of the discoveries and encounters that were defining moments in our reflections.
Google Garage
In 2012, a team of employees at Google decided to expand their company’s culture of Innovation by building a hacker/maker/design space available to all Google employees in Mountain View.
By doing so, they openly invited them to learn, create and make things, fostering wild ideas and moonshot thinking.
When we heard about this program, we reached out to its founders, and we were surprised by their openness to share their first steps building the Google Garage, their experiments, and their day to day experience running it.
Embracing the same challenge they chose to address and inspired by what they had accomplished, we decided to try and build our own Garage, and were lucky to get their support during our humble beginnings.
We are grateful to have crossed Mames’s and Frederik’s paths, who have instigated us into innovating by the same standards of openness and generosity.
We pursued with the same energy by looking for mentors, allies and accomplices in places we never thought would be so enriching. Here are some of them:
ICI Montreuil
ICI Montreuil was one of the first maker space we visited. We were impressed by the ambition, ideas and realizations of its founder Nicolas.
More than a maker space, ICI Montreuil also incubates a wide range of expertise, promoting digital startups, arts and crafts.
Renault Creative Lab
We met Renault Creative Lab co-founder Mickael Desmoulins, and immediately got along.
His natural take on creativity and innovation is very inspiring. Soon after our initial encounter, we decided to found the FAB&CO association.
Stanford d/School
The Stanford D.School is working closely with Google. They taught us how space arrangements can influence creative behaviors.
We played with various space properties to design “Le Garage”, and used techniques like saturation, filling our mediation wall with pictures of famous founders in their garages, other garage initiatives, and articles.
Air Liquide i-Lab
Air Liquide is implementing the “Corporate Garage” model as described by Harvard Business Review.
They combined a think tank, an internal FabLab, a startup accelerator and a venture fund.
They have put in place all the processes required to bring an idea to a competitive advantage or to spin it off in a startup.
Fast Company
Fast company is a fantastic source of inspiration, in particular the Co.Design section of their web site.
They often showcase inspirational places such as Google offices, Google [x] and ventures war room, as well as motivational videos we almost watched daily in our early stages.
Harvard Business Review
