Open Innovation. Pascal Latouche

Figure 3.1. Mrs. Elodie Sarfati. For a color version of the figure, see www.iste.co.uk/latouche/innovation.zip

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      Mrs. Chrystèle Sanon, “A Schizophrenic Who Treats Herself?”

      Looking for profiles that I could interview for this book, I had put a post on LinkedIn for this purpose. I got feedback from someone I didn’t know at all: Mrs. Chrystèle Sanon. The return said verbatim, “If you are looking for profiles of ‘schizophrenic’ female entrepreneurs in recovery, I can testify”. I must confess I was very amused by the answer. If Chrystèle wanted to stand out from the many entrepreneurs who were offering to answer an interview, then she had succeeded.

      Once we got in touch, we made an appointment to meet at the Station F, a mecca for entrepreneurship in France, and I was going to discover this “schizophrenic”, at least according to her words…. I was expecting a very long interview to discover her multiple personalities…. At the first handshake, I understood that I was in front of a determined person and much more rigorous than her LinkedIn message could have made me feel.

4.1. Context

      4.1.1. The origins

      Born into a cosmopolitan family (father: Italo-Guadeloupean; mother: Haitian), Chrystèle oscillated for a long time between France and the USA where she has ties. She is said to be the child of two nomads and “exoticism is sedentary” in her eyes. It is in France that she developed in the end, not without always wondering even today what her life would have been like if she had chosen the USA.

      A woman of intuition, she very quickly understood that her life would not be in a conventional approach and her journey bears witness to this. It was a permanent search to reconcile paradoxes.

It is a paradox to seek a balance between the absolute necessity to always go beyond our imitations, while preserving a reassuring comfort. It is a paradox to want to make law, which leads to support functions, while seeking to participate in the process of creation in a company.

      This paradoxical personality (and this is a compliment coming from me) has finally found its balance in entrepreneurship as you will discover.

      4.1.2. A voluntary journey

      Chrystèle tried to combine two passions: law and the media. “I love law and I always wanted to be a journalist”. A leitmotiv in the development of her knowledge: to reach BAC + 5. It was a desire on the part of the young Chrystèle who did not address it in a linear way. Because of the hazards of life, at the time Chrystèle started her working life (I will come back to this later), she only held a master’s degree in business law. It is with the determination that I know of her now that she sought other knowledge, other skills with a Master 2 in Multimedia and Information Systems, then an MBA in International Economic Strategy.

      All this has forged her skills that were all the more solid as they were acquired during her professional career. Thus, corporate law, management, media law, litigation, negotiation and contracts are all areas that hold little or no secrets for her.

      4.1.3. Towards working life

      Her professional experience has been in the media industry. Chrystèle was a lawyer at the time. The convergence between her interest in law and the media could now be achieved. She spent many years there, and during all these years, she did not forget to continue her training, no doubt in search of a broadening of her competences. A somewhat “peculiar” jurist because, without in any way directing this against her colleagues, Chrystèle would have liked to be able to go beyond her mission. Going beyond her mission was a necessity for her in order not to be confined only to the boundaries of the legal world.

      As you can imagine, in the world of large groups, schools of thought are still the norm. If you’re a lawyer, then you might as well not have any opinions on the marketing thing, for example. I would guard myself against expressing an opinion on the matter. It’s also understandable that the person whose job it is to market doesn’t really want to be challenged every five minutes. All points of view can be defended. In any case, this environment forcing Chrystèle to stay in a company led her to add another string to her bow.

4.2. From employment to entrepreneurship

      I remember when Chrystèle and I were going to get in touch having analyzed her career history on LinkedIn. I had certainly seen a very solid foundation of skills, as well as several entrepreneurial creations. One of the questions I asked myself then was how she had had the time to do so many things. While the previous paragraph gives the answer (working and training at the same time), you might still wonder about this career history. How did this lead to entrepreneurship? And more importantly, why? Nice professional situations, nice degrees, enough to live comfortably without risk, right?

      4.2.1. The emergence of an entrepreneur

      It happens more often than we think, that between what we do and what we are, things are not completely aligned. Chrystèle likes to call herself a “deviant legal partner”. It is a self-diagnosis resulting from studies and research that she did to better understand how it works. Convinced that this notion of positive deviance from the management sciences was as much a key to personal understanding as it was a solution proposal, she started out as an independent consultant serving small-business entrepreneurs, individuals or founders of start-ups.

      If you want and know how to have opinions on much more than what is in your field of responsibility within a corporation, this, as I suggested above, can be tricky. The freelancer doesn’t have that problem.

      4.2.2. Her first entrepreneurial experience

      As an independent consultant, you have more freedom to advise, defend a point of view and decide with whom you finally want to interact. For an empathetic Chrystèle, always listening actively, with a broad smile, being independent was the first step to manage her paradoxes and finally live better.

      Someone who thought for a long time that she lacked sufficient references to find her inner balance and in her relationship with others, ended up living better. “I have my own ideas, and they are no less than those of a great thinker”. Many would tell me that Chrystèle shows false humility or pretension with such a statement. Either that is not the case or there are two and many of us in this world who are like her. To want to share with others because “Without others, nothing has any flavor”, and still have self-esteem and the will to