The National Center for Space Studies, CNES (Centre national d'études spatiales), is the French national space agency. Their mission is to develop the future space systems and maintain France's leadership in the space industry. The CNES strategy for maturing new technologies is to identify potential partners and invest in projects that fit their innovation axes.
As CNES has a wide variety of innovation areas and partner types, they needed to track their ecosystem's complexity and orchestrate the various services they provide.
The Challenge
CNES was using multiple tools and processes to manage their hundreds of projects and partners. Aside from the fact that this led to data silos, CNES didn’t know if this was only the visible surface of their actual ecosystem. They asked data management and innovation consultants, Ecosys Business Partners, to run an audit which underlined the need for a collaborative platform. Being adopted across the 15 teams, this platform would allow them to:
- Centralize and share information on companies from the French space ecosystem, to maximize their development through the support of the different teams.
- Harmonize processes with a common, structured frame of reference (sectors, technologies involved, type of project, etc.).
- Spotlight and promote internally and externally successful projects initiated and deployed by the ecosystem.
I was impressed by the fast and streamlined deployment of Bloomflow which took into consideration our multiple customization requests. The solution perfectly answered our needs, as summarized by Ecosys. Another important value is Bloomflow’s commitment to maintaining high levels of data security and GDPR compliance, both of which are crucial to our operations at CNES.
Pauline Pannier / Secretary General at CNES
CNES
Ecosys Business Partners
Bloomflow
The Solution
CNES, Ecosys, and Bloomflow worked closely together to implement the Bloomflow platform and onboard 15 different teams simultaneously. Each team had specific needs requiring customized configuration to ensure a full adoption of the platform.
The quick adoption of the Bloomflow solution has been made possible by the fact that legacy data was populated from 20 different sources.
Thanks to the support of Ecosys and the involvement of the Bloomflow teams, we were able to set up the platform in only 5 months, from specification to operational deployment. Today, Bloomflow is perfectly configured and adapted to meet the needs of the Connect-by-CNES program to identify, monitor and support French NewSpace players.
Frédéric Adragna / Connect by CNES Program Head
Bloomflow now serves as the single source of truth for managing innovation objectives, monitoring relevant projects or partnerships, and sharing information securely with other users.
The Bloomflow Application Portal also allows CNES to expand its reach by offering potential partners unlimited entry points to engage with them. The CNES teams are then able to qualify partners’ applications based on accurate and most up-to-date information, and easily spot business opportunities on a single pane of glass.
In order to provide CNES with a customized solution, Bloomflow implemented the workflows, datasets, and user roles that were designed by Ecosys.
Our teams have quickly adopted Bloomflow thanks to its intuitive interface. They can use the Bloomflow mobile app outside their office, for example when meeting new "space players" at trade shows. The platform was ready-to-use from day one, as it has been enriched with our legacy data. As our unique source of truth, Bloomflow is vital for us to run our innovation and NewSpace development activities efficiently.