Innovation Award

This award will recognize excellence among businesses driving innovation and engaged in fostering French-American trade relations.

Guidelines

Innovation Award Guidelines can be found here.

2018 Nominees

Jury 2018

Chairs

Julien Hervet - Cépaé

Claudia Mitchell - Universal Cells

Jury Members

Nicolas Gaume - Space Cargo Unlimited

Burak Uzman - Coriolis Composites

Laurent Lathieyre - Microsoft

Frederic Joseph - Microsoft

Frédéric Dubut - Microsoft

VICIS, Valerie Carricaburu, PhD, Director Strategic Initiatives:

VICIS is a Seattle-based company focused on sports protective technology with a mission to protect athletes of all ages. VICIS was founded in mid-2013 to address the sports-related head health issue in contact sports, beginning with football. Its founders were struck by the lack of innovation in helmets and were surprised by how few startups were attacking safety and performance issues. The industry was (and remains) ripe for innovation. VICIS’ inaugural product, the ZERO1 football helmet, launched in 2017 and was top-ranked in the 2017 and 2018 NFL/NFLPA helmet performance tests. The ZERO1 successfully launched to NFL and elite NCAA teams and was used by hundreds of players during the 2017/18 season. VICIS’ product is designed and manufactured in Seattle, WA. TIME Magazine named the ZERO1 as one of the Best 25 Inventions of 2017. VICIS’ Director of Strategic Initiatives, Valerie Carricaburu, is a French national. Valerie oversees VICIS' intellectual property portfolio, working with engineers to identify innovations to protect and exploring best technologies/features to integrate within VICIS products.

Microsoft/Radiant Studios, David Catuhe, Principal Program Manager:

Babylon.js is an open source framework that allows you to create stunning 3D experiences in your browser. Built with simplicity and performance in mind, it is the engine that fuels the Remix3D site or the Xbox Design Lab. Babylon.js allows web developers to create stunning 3D experiences without advanced knowledge of math or optic problems. Babylon.js innovates in its approach in that any web developer, even with little to no knowledge of JavaScript, can create a complete immersive experience in ten lines of code, even including support for virtual reality. The engine was designed from ground up with simplicity in mind with the following motto: "One feature is one line of code." The project was started in 2012 in France as a personal endeavor of David Catuhe. The community quickly caught up and Babylon.js now has around 170 contributors from around the world. Babylon.js is an open source project, so while it is difficult to measure sales, its visibility is apparent through its wide audience. In 2017, Microsoft offered to create a team to officially support the engine and it is used by products such as PowerPoint, Bing, Xbox, OneDrive and other Microsoft products, as well as other non-Microsoft organizations such as the U.S. Army, GE Power, Toyota and National Geographic, among others.

Farm to Table Tours, Inc., Michael Cavitt, CEO/Co-founder:

Farm to Table Tours, Inc is a Washington startup focusing initially on the development of small, curated tours in France. It was founded by Michael Cavitt, the organization’s CEO alongside Sonya Warner, the COO. Its mission is to connect travelers to food and producers in a specific department or region of France. Farm to Table Tours, Inc. offer three tours in the 2018-2019 year. Each tour begins at a food and agricultural event and then spends five days in the locality diving deep in the food, meeting producers, visiting production facilities, and sightseeing. Daily outings during the tour will include admittance to a major French food and cultural event, intimate instructional sessions with small growers or producers of French produce or craft, and cultural sightseeing. Their goal is for customers to gain a deeper appreciation of French food, culture, and heritage during their travels. These activities provide participants an opportunity to connect with, interact with, and become acquainted with local producers of food and agricultural products. The French tours offered by Farm to Table Tours, Inc. cultivate passion by giving customers one-on-one connections to small and family-owned French businesses and a sharing of ideas.

Dassault Systèmes, Sandeep Sandhu, Area Leader, N. America West:

Dassault Systemes is a scientific company combining science, technology and art for a sustainable society that aims to provide businesses & people with 3DEXPERIENCE universes to imagine sustainable innovations capable of harmonizing product, nature and life. Dassault Systemes’ customers are industry leaders at the heart of innovation. The DEXPERIENCE platform provides software solutions for every organization - from marketing to sales to engineering - that help in the value creation process, to create differentiating consumer experiences. With a single, easy-to-use interface, it powers industry solution experiences, based on 3D design, analysis, simulation and intelligence software in a collaborative interactive environment. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform can reduce integration and support costs, improve productivity, foster new innovation, and aid in the introduction of best practice processes to deliver standard work across the value chain. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform can not only simulate products and processes, but also find and eliminate potential risks and quality issues before production. The 3DEXPERIENCE Platform will help OEMs and their supply chains drive efficiency, reduce waste and shorten product development cycles to meet market demand. Boeing will expand its deployment of Dassault Systemes products across its commercial aviation, space and defense programs to include the Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE platform. Dassault Systems is a Gold Circle Member of the French Chamber of Commerce, and in turn a strong contributor to the local Francophone business community. Dassault Systems continues to invest in synergies between its French heritage, and those where we do business, particularly in North America.

Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine (ISCRM) at the UW, Julie Mathieu, Acting Assistant Professor:

The Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine (ISCRM) and the Ellison Stem Cell core offer full-service genome editing in stem cells from various species. The new CRISPR/Cas9 technology is a powerful tool that has revolutionized the field of genome editing in the past few years. The core provides consultation, design of CRISPR strategies, as well as cell culture services to screen for edited cell lines. Genome editing services include generation of knock-out, point mutation and knock-in engineered cell lines. The CRISPR-Cas9 technology has drastically improved the efficiency of editing and made it easier to modify genomes, though it remains difficult, tedious, and cost prohibitive in particular stem cells. Research scientists prefer to focus on their biological questions rather than spending time and money on building the tools needed to answer their questions. The Ellison Stem Cell core at the ISCRM offers the expertise and the technical help to generate the tools necessary to advance their research. The Ellison Stem Cell core at the ISCRM provides access to resources and full-services in this emerging area of research and technology. French-born and raised Julie Mathieu is an acting assistant professor at the University of Washington in the department of Comparative Medicine and associate director of the Ellison Stem Cell core at the ISCRM. In the core facility, Julie is in charge of the new genome editing services. This new service was launched about nine months ago to help the Seattle scientific community with their research in basic biology, disease modeling and regenerative medicine. In the past nine months, the Ellison Stem Cell core at the ISCRM has been involved in over 15 different projects from nine different laboratories, and successfully generated 12 genome edited lines. There is an increasing demand in the Seattle scientific community.

Microsoft Translator (MT) Group, Olivier Fontana, Director Product Strategy:

The goal of the Microsoft Translator (MT) group is to break the language barrier for end users and enterprise alike, for all scenarios. MT started as an incubation project in the early 2000s and has since been used by thousands of companies in multiple domains for many scenarios: ecommerce (ETSY, Amazon), Gaming apps multi-lingual chats (Machine Zone, YouZu, etc), social Media (Twitter, Foursquare, WeChat, LinkedIn), customer support, internal communication etc. Following the work focused on text translation, MT started to work on speech translation in 2013. This multi-team project went from research proof-of-concept (February 2014) to first "commercial" (actually free) use case in 8 months with the release in December 2014 of the Skype Translator feature, i.e. the integration of Microsoft Translator speech translation technology into Skype. This speech translation for conversations and not only short sentences was then made available to developers through a new speech translation API (March 2015), and through a new feature, Translator live (December 2016), that enables a "personal universal translator" type feature where up to 100 people can hold a real-time multi-lingual conversation in 10 speech and more than 60 text languages. This feature was also made available in July 2017 as a PowerPoint add-in. Presentation Translator has been deployed in several schools in the region, such as Chinook Middle School. The innovative technologies developed by MT help improve accessibility for deaf and foreign students and parents in the school system, help travelers communicate when abroad, and help companies and not for profit organizations communicate their message and with their community across the language barrier at a coast and scale impossible reach with human translation alone.