Transcript of the interview:
Antoine: Hello and welcome to our podcast on innovation makers. Today, it's a great pleasure to welcome Jean-Marie Buchilly. We've known each other for almost 30 years — we studied together, we worked together — and it's a real pleasure to have you here. To kick off, could you walk us through your background for our audience? It's quite an original one.
Jean-Marie: Thank you for the invitation, Antoine. It's great to be here — really glad to join you. My career has been quite diverse, when I think about it. We met at EPFL studying microtechnology and both graduated in 2001. You went your way with FiveCo. I joined a start-up called Synova — we did laser cutting, and I worked as an application engineer. It was a great first job: I got to travel, discover a lot of things. A solid start. Then I joined Fischer Connectors, where I spent 17 years across three phases. First: project manager, essentially self-taught — learning, exploring, developing products. Then I moved into a new product development manager role, managing a development team. And finally, the third phase — which is where we collaborated the most — leading an innovation team.
Antoine: And after Fischer Connectors, you moved to the Water Department of the City of Lausanne, which is what you're doing today.
Jean-Marie: Exactly. The title includes "innovation" — very much so — but the full title is actually "innovation and customer relations." I find it interesting that the two were put together. It says something meaningful about innovation. I've been there for about two and a half years now, and it's been a radical change — moving from private to public, from a highly technical world of microtechnicians to environmental engineers and civil engineers. A very interesting rupture.
Antoine: Let's set the frame: what's your own definition of innovation today?
Jean-Marie: It's a question everyone always wants answered, and there's no single right answer — but the one that resonates most with me, and that I've had time to develop, is: unlikely connections. It ties into something I deeply believe: in the corporate world, we tend to value experts and vertical silos. But I'm convinced my added value lies elsewhere — in cross-disciplinary thinking, in connecting domains that weren't meant to meet but where you create the encounter anyway. There's an element of being an innovator, but also a matchmaker: bringing two fields together and seeing what sparks from that meeting.
Antoine: You also created a competition at Fischer — can you tell us more about that?
Jean-Marie: It was truly a highlight of my time at Fischer. We started innovation with participatory innovation — no lab, no dedicated team yet. We created a programme open to everyone, with tools and coaches, running over an extended period. But at some point, that kind of initiative runs out of steam. So we decided to do something one shot — an event we called the Blue Lab Challenge. Four weeks, one topic, one question. Teams had to respond to that question alongside their regular work, during lunch breaks or in their own time. The question was deliberately broad: how do you go from identifying a customer need all the way to delivering a first prototype into the customer's hands — in 5 days? It generated tremendous energy. The jury was made up of external entrepreneurs — it wouldn't have made sense for Fischer to judge its own solutions. Those four weeks had as much impact as several months — even years — of the Blue Lab. People came away with something lasting. In terms of culture and mindset, it genuinely changed things.
Antoine: And if I recall correctly, the teams were very mixed — secretaries, engineers, production operators?
Jean-Marie: Absolutely. In fact, a team of five engineers couldn't succeed — they were missing an entire dimension. The challenge spanned from need identification to delivery, so you needed logistics, procurement, production, engineering, R&D. The multidisciplinary teams were the most effective.
Antoine: Were you surprised by the results?
Jean-Marie: Results can be measured in different ways. From the standpoint of engagement and mindset evolution, it was wonderful — people learned to think a bit differently, to reason more broadly. In terms of pure output, we weren't expecting miracles — the iPhone didn't come out of it — but the culture and mindset shift? Absolutely.
Antoine: What makes an innovation lab succeed?
Jean-Marie: I couldn't say exactly what makes it succeed, but I can tell you what was difficult for us. The first challenge: an innovation lab starts with a blank page. Some people thrive on that, others less so. And you face a fundamental question: what does the organisation actually expect from us? Nobody really knew. So we had to go ask questions and build our own framework. The second challenge: we came from R&D, and we had to find our place in the organisation. The R&D team had well-established methods — Fischer has been making connectors for over 65 years. We arrived with a different approach: defocusing attention away from the pure technical solution, focusing on the need, asking questions that weren't always engineering questions. That created misunderstandings and communication difficulties. But we had the advantage of being embedded within the organisation — not in a remote lab at EPFL — and that allowed us to exchange constantly with the teams, and gradually diffuse our mindset directly into the R&D culture.
Antoine: You're now in the public sector. How is innovation managed there?
Jean-Marie: When I joined, I asked myself: what does innovation even mean in the water sector? And I discovered that the world of water is deeply innovative by nature. It integrates new technologies, uses them, finds coherent applications. I arrived in an ecosystem that was already innovating — just not always using the word. One assumption I quickly shattered: things can move fast in the public sector. And there is funding — in water particularly, with dedicated levies, it's an almost self-financed domain, almost a company within a company. The common thread with Fischer: in both cases, you need to spend time identifying the real need. You can quickly get lost in technological fantasies — and in both cases, that doesn't work. For example, we're currently working on smart metering. It's a known concept, nothing new. But the real question is: why, and what value does it create for whom? Spending money is easy — but why? What's the business model? Innovation isn't only technical. You can be more creative on the economic model to generate more value.
Antoine: Looking across your whole career, which project stands out as the biggest challenge?
Jean-Marie: It would be at Fischer, where I spent most of my time and where the work was very technical. There were two constraints that kept colliding throughout all 17 years: maximising the number of contacts in the smallest possible volume, and transmitting as much data as possible at very high speed. You can take the improvement route — slightly reduce the diameter of the metal contacts, fit a few more in — but you end up with something fragile and unreliable. Or you look at other technologies, not necessarily used in connector manufacturing, but potentially transposable. Several projects came out of that, including the rotating optical connector. We also worked with a technology called MID — injecting plastic parts, activating them, depositing a metallic layer on top, with complex designs we spent time simulating. And there was always the same challenge at the end: making a demonstrator or prototype is relatively easy — but for me, that's not yet innovation, it's closer to an invention. It becomes innovation when you know how to produce it: when it's industrialised, reliable, robust, and satisfying to the end user. Not everything we tested made it onto the customer's shelf — that's clear.
Antoine: How would you describe the collaboration with FiveCo?
Jean-Marie: I'll answer with an example. On one of the very first projects we worked on together at Fischer, we had mandated you on a specific subject — the analysis of a product. You delivered the job perfectly, technically spot on. And then at the end, there was a little extra: a proposal, an idea. We hadn't necessarily asked you to brainstorm on how to make things different or better — but you did it anyway and brought it to us. It led to another project — the exploration of a slightly different connector based on that proposal. For me, that was brilliant: you give a mandate and you get back the mandate result plus a proposal, an idea. It captures the value of FiveCo well — creativity and expertise. We had both. My colleagues at the time appreciated it too.
Antoine: To close — one single word to define innovation.
Jean-Marie: State of mind.
Antoine: I love it. I share that view — it rings very true after all the projects we've managed together. A huge thank you for this interview. It was a real pleasure exchanging with you about innovation. And I know you often write posts about innovation — it's interesting for our audience to understand that whether public or private, innovation is truly everywhere.
Jean-Marie: Absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you, Antoine.