As preparations begin for the BIG salon, organized by Bpifrance and set to take place on October 8 at the Accor Arena, Paul-François Fournier, Executive Director of Innovation at Bpifrance and author of Innovation² (Anne Carrière, 2024), is urging large companies to embrace transformation in order to scale up the innovations of start-ups. Fournier highlights that about twenty years ago, many industries—such as retail, banking, media, and telecommunications—had to adapt to the rise of the digital world. Initially, these companies treated the Internet as just another channel, but eventually realized that digital was reshaping how businesses were designed, requiring changes in information systems, logistics, employee skills, and decision-making methods. Fournier emphasizes that for a technological breakthrough to have a real impact, it must be paired with industrial transformation. He argues that innovation is not guaranteed and requires constant questioning and adaptation. In this context, courage for a company often means not taking a dramatic risk, but instead accepting the need to change before being forced to. This involves being open to reinvention and embracing new ways of operating. Over the past fifteen years, large companies have increasingly partnered with start-ups, creating incubators, accelerators, venture capital funds, and open innovation teams. This shift helped bridge cultural gaps and allowed for more experimentation. However, Fournier notes that this first phase of collaboration has reached its limits, with many projects getting stuck at the prototype or proof of concept stage. Start-ups may show the value of their solutions in a few months, but they often face delays in being integrated into larger organizations due to issues like purchasing processes, cybersecurity, information systems, or the lack of a decision-maker who can support deployment. Fournier points out that the challenge now is not just finding promising start-ups, but ensuring that their innovations can reach the markets and industrial capabilities needed to scale. Many start-ups today are developing solutions that have the potential to transform entire industries, exploring technologies and applications that large companies may not have the resources, time, or culture to pursue on their own. This shift is changing the nature of innovation, which is no longer solely created within a company but increasingly generated outside its walls. Artificial intelligence is a prime example, with new companies emerging rapidly with evolving models, tools, and applications. However, this trend extends to areas such as cybersecurity, health, decarbonization, materials, industry, robotics, and even quantum technologies. Fournier argues that for large companies, working with these innovative start-ups is no longer just a way to occasionally modernize a process or gather intelligence. Instead, it is a means to access a distributed, fast, and specialized innovation capacity. However, scaling up requires mutual transformation: start-ups must adapt to the constraints of large companies by strengthening their governance, securing their technology, and learning to sell to complex organizations. At the same time, large companies must provide the necessary support—brands, customers, data, distribution networks, and industrialization capabilities—to turn promising innovations into widely deployed solutions. To move forward, Fournier suggests that companies must shift from occasional collaboration to a real industrial capacity for integrating external innovation. This requires adapting procurement processes to better suit young companies, shortening decision-making timelines, improving access to data and infrastructure, and appointing a clearly mandated person to lead the deployment of new solutions. He argues that this transformation should be driven by the business lines, with collaboration with start-ups becoming an operational project with a budget, clear objectives, and executive responsibility. Fournier concludes that for a leader, courage is not about taking reckless risks, but recognizing that stagnation can be the greatest risk. Twenty years ago, some companies had the courage to understand that they needed to reinvent themselves to enter the digital world, questioning their stores, branches, processes, and methods of scaling. Today, similar choices are being faced as artificial intelligence and other breakthrough technologies continue to accelerate innovation. Large companies cannot invent everything themselves, but they do have the capacity to industrialize, distribute, and deploy innovations on a large scale. The role of the BIG salon is to create the connections that enable this transformation, allowing those who explore new ideas to collaborate with those who can scale them. The future will likely belong not to companies that have simply observed the most innovations, but to those that have had the courage to change themselves in order to scale their innovations. Perhaps this is the truest form of courage: accepting that to change the world, it sometimes has to begin with changing oneself.