SMAU Milano 2025 | Interview with Laurent Chantalat, L’Oreal

At SMAU Milano 2025 we interviewed Laurent Chantalat, Open Innovation Technology Partnering, L’Oreal and we asked him what is innovation for L’Oreal and what is their approach when they work with start ups: “Innovation for L'Oreal is something that will please our consumers, and consumers are more and more demanding. They want products that last longer. The colors are brighter. So our innovation comes from our consumers. Their needs. Therefore, we have to help them to reach their goals. So innovation for me and R&D, because I am within the R&D, really means to find new ingredients, new solutions that will provide these needs. But another way of innovating as well is to follow our sustainable goals. We want our products to be better for the planet, better for the future. Therefore, also innovation means sometimes that it's maybe the same product as we used to have, but it's made in a different way, in a more sustainable way. So sometimes it's transparent to the consumer because we just made the molecule in a different way. But it's better for the planet. So if innovation for us is of course satisfaction for our consumers, but it's also to be always better for the planet. So we have to marry these two together if the performance is very good, but not for the good for the planet, we can't take it. So we have to meet these two goals: satisfying our customers and be friendly for the planet. So first, we truly believe that the innovation of of tomorrow will certainly come from startups. We don't know from which one. So therefore our approach is quite systematic. We try to map out the whole world as broadly as possible, maintaining our our real needs, our priorities and then we go in search and we really search deeply. And then, once we have identified this startup - and it could be at events like Smau, of course, or could be because we have posted a challenge somewhere - we will discuss, understand deeply their technology. Also, it's very important with startups to work in a friendly environment, safe environment, because of course they are always a bit scared to lose their technology to these big groups. So we try reassure them that their technology is their technology. We just want to be able to use them if it's the best one, and we will do everything we can to work together so that these technologies becomes available to as many consumers as possible worldwide. So we really try to understand what are their needs, what do they want from us, what, and then put that technology through our process of evaluating, testing, formulating until it moves along in a nice way. And very important at the end really is finding the right business model. What does the company, what the startup wants: just she wants to be just a supplier, that's fine with us, we will buy the product. Does it want to license the technology because it's not in their field and they don't want to manufacture for cosmetics. We can do that under a license. Or do they want to sell the whole IP, the intellectual property. So we really design the way we're going to work with them, and especially we try to give as much chance as possible to their technology. We just don't try it a little bit and then if it doesn't work we'll try to understand why and carry on. So we try to understand each other. It's an understanding problem really. And make sure that everybody's happy.”