Open Innovation. Pascal Latouche
during her time at the IFM, Lise answered an advert for an internship … in a large cosmetics company. She had already applied there, unsuccessfully, when she was in business school. She tried her luck again.
6.2.1. Paid employment
Her studies at the IFM made the difference, and she was taken on an internship basis. This allowed her to design a whole training program for employees. A very nice challenge for Lise who experienced it as a first achievement. During this internship, she met all the major players in the company, marketing, engineers, etc. Professional life became meaningful because it could bring together both the desire to be involved in creation and exchanging with others. There is probably nothing more beautiful than bringing to Others, and it is probably at this moment of the interview that I understood her depth. At the end of the internship … she was recruited on a paid basis as make-up product manager.
“It has always been natural for me to unite people around a project and I am a creative woman”. Lise’s career with this major cosmetics group was to be a dazzling one. First in consumer product make-up, as product manager, then as Marketing Manager. She was then entrusted with the most beautiful luxury brands, which she improved for some and raised to the rank of number 1 for others. In total, 10 years on international make-up brands, serving beauty and femininity.
She was then entrusted with the Global Marketing Department of Travel Retail, with the aim of federating and structuring the business of products sold in airports worldwide, thus strengthening her assets as a manager of very interdisciplinary projects and its international dimension. Around 2008, a time when many major groups, including her own, were making innovation a priority. She was offered a major new opportunity: to imagine and create the Make up Innovation Department for the whole world.
Her objective: to build the 5-year innovation plan for all make-up brands. “It was fabulous to start from a blank canvas, to invent tomorrow and to identify the best levers with the 600 people in R&D and interface packaging”. Very driven by the desire to create and very respectful of people, it is in the collective that Lise passionately grew this Innovation Department and it has led to many great innovations. The strength of her convictions and her internal network enabled her to sometimes succeed in the impossible, for example, by initiating major and transforming developments in the Chinese make-up market, then barely emerging.
However, it was not a long quiet journey: “I have always mobilized a lot of energy and commitment, a very powerful driving force”. “I’ve been hit in the face, too”. A trademark of Lise’s, no doubt about it, as her frankness and authenticity must have disturbed more than one. Innovating is not always easy, and if you don’t meet the right people at times, it’s not surprising that you have to defend obvious approaches. And these approaches you will certainly defend to the strength of your faith. Lise’s is great….
After 20 years of focusing on brands, international in retail, and innovation, Lise felt like she had more or less gone around the block, arriving at a crossroads… This led to profound questions about the meaning of her life, her usefulness to others. “A real challenge that must be addressed face to face”. “It takes courage, but it’s the only real solution”. All of these were triggers for her departure towards entrepreneurship.
6.2.2. The trigger
First of all, in all large groups, you inevitably have constraints and opportunities. But there comes a time when, inevitably, there are breaking points, the balance, if it does not suit you, disturbs you: this was the case for Lise, the balance being broken, she decided to take another direction in her life.
Another event was also the trigger for this profound questioning that would strongly influence the course of her career and her life. Her father became seriously ill and died shortly after his retirement. “It was so unfair”. “You don’t have to wait until retirement to do things that are essential to you. Life is here and now, because later on, you don’t know”.
Finally, Lise moved from Paris to the greater suburbs in a real house with space. She rediscovered her roots: painting, working with materials, nature. She had never totally abandoned painting throughout her life, but it was not easy for her to let her artistic soul express itself in an apartment in Paris, with a family life and the education of two young children. There, in her new home, she had “finally” a real space. “The greenery returned, the painting returned, the reconstruction, it reconnected me to a certain spirituality, to the sacred”.
6.2.3. Entrepreneurship
“I wanted to find meaning, to be true to myself, to grow, and to pass it on to others”. It is this deep faith that led her to want to stay aligned with what she really wanted: to create freely and without constraint, to bring to light the beauty of the world around us, to celebrate this universal beauty: “because I deeply believe that contacting this beauty can change our vision of the world and make us want to preserve it”. It is in this part of the interview that we realized a common interest: Eckart Tollé and his approach to life. Both the lived past and the desired future are only illusions. It is necessary to build and to realize oneself in the present tense. Why the digression? Because “everything is readable when you take the time to understand what you are going through; of course, a big salary is not enough to fill a life”.
Lise left the large Group and founded an Innovation Consulting agency, Lise Bellavoine Conseil. It turns out that this large group became its first customer. “I’ve been so lucky. My expertise had been much appreciated during all these years, we are now weaving together a new path, and it is also a beautiful story”. Lise, makes her reconversion with greater freedom in doing so, while continuing to flourish in innovation. “Inventing the future is natural for me and I trust life”. She can offer creative concepts and innovative methodologies that are highly appreciated.
Her advice on innovation is specific, and she demonstrated this to me, in the respect of confidentiality and deontology that is required. Her concept: to reinvent approaches in cosmetics (a field in which she has expertise) by using innovative approaches resulting from the intervention of other fields (e.g. paper, food, textiles, etc.). The aim is to understand the innovative processes, solutions, etc. in these other fields and to turn them into a prism of disruptive innovations for the cosmetics industry. It is demanding groundwork that requires a sense of multi-perspective analysis, at the crossroads of research, interviews, documentation, travel, consumer studies “I’ve already lost 15 lives doing this”. Depending on the problems of cosmetic brands, mostly, but not only, her advice allows her to provide concrete, innovative and operational answers.
But this reconversion is not only a reconversion to do more and differently in innovation, it is also to have time for her painting. They both motivate her. “I have wonderful encounters, I take the time to meet the other person, I do a lot of research, I spend hours observing, and it is all this that inspires me in the pastels and paintings I show. I work on the respect of biodiversity, on the beauty of the world around us. There are encounters between my paintings and people. I want to bring light, kindness and meaning”. “I always start my paintings with the eye…. It connects us to each other”.
From there to think that one day perhaps, her two current activities, innovation consulting and artist/painter will merge….
“Every day, I see it, opening up to others builds bridges…”.
All the best!
Figure 6.1. Pastels by Lise Bellavoine
