Innovation Accelerator: innovating in one year, from problem to on-site test — TotalEnergies keynote at Tech For Industry Show 2026 (Paris Expo Porte de Versailles).
TotalEnergies spends €1 billion a year on research and innovation. But how to move industrial innovation from the long timeframe of research (often decades) to a very short one? The group set a radical goal: one year between a problem raised by a site and the test of a solution.
The head of innovation presents the entity created two years ago, Innovation Accelerator: a centralized team of generalists that builds, for each problem, an agile "squad" (business sponsor, field operator, technical expert), breaks internal barriers (contracts in under a month) and promotes the right to fail.
Two concrete cases illustrate the approach: robotic in-service inspection of oil tanks without shutdown (over €10M/year saved in France) and drone inspection of ship ballasts with embedded AI. Two-year results: 500 problems received, 250 handled, 150 live, ~70 deployed.
