Creating an industrial 'chaire'

Conducting a research project Industrial Chaire Research partnerships Cifre thesis

An Industrial Research Chaire (French research consortium) enables your company to benefit from academic expertise, access to research facilities, and talent training, while supporting the development of new knowledge and technologies in a field of common interest with IMT Atlantique.

The industrial research chaire, a form of partnership with the institution

Creating an industrial research chaire is one of the possible forms of partnership between your company and IMT Atlantique. It's an innovative research program with an industrial scope, bringing you closer to our research laboratories around shared scientific interests. It can also include training and dissemination dimensions. It's a win/win approach: the laboratory and its team benefit from additional resources to consolidate its work, and you benefit from strategic spin-offs for your long-term development and competitiveness. Here are the main phases:

  • Identify a topic of common interest: your company characterizes a specific research or technological topic of priority and strategic interest. It must, of course, coincide with IMT Atlantique's scientific positioning.
  • Drawing up a financial package: we jointly identify the financing arrangements best suited to the industrial research chaire project. This may involve setting up an industrial chaire via sponsorship (compatible with the Research Tax Credit) or via the ANR call for projects (subsidy on co-financing). The funds are used to finance research activities, equipment, theses, researchers' salaries, etc.
  • Identify resource personnel: we identify the research teams and professors/researchers relevant to the industrial chaire project. A chairholder is appointed. He or she is responsible for supervising research activities, defining objectives, coordinating efforts and ensuring that the Chaire achieves its objectives.
  • Draw up a research plan: this is the result of close collaboration between your company and the IMT Atlantique team involved in the project. It defines the priority research areas, the objectives to be achieved and the timetable.
  • Recruiting researchers: the Chaire program may lead to the recruitment of researchers, PhD students or research assistants to work on the defined research projects. They will work in collaboration with your project teams.
  • Share the results: in the case of a sponsorship chaire, the results are not confidential and cannot be the subject of an intellectual property registration by you alone. In the case of an ANR industrial chaire, an agreement will be drawn up to share the intellectual property and any commercial spin-offs generated by the industrial chaire.
  • Duration of the chaire: depending on their nature, industrial research chaires often have a fixed duration of three to four years.

Fruitful collaboration between IMT Atlantique and its industrial partners

Here are a few examples of successful collaboration between IMT Atlantique and its industrial partners:

  • Phillips, partner of the AI-A Chaire for the development of new medical image analysis methods to help diagnose and monitor cerebral palsy patients using artificial intelligence.
  • Argans, CLS, Eodyn, Microsoft, Naval Group, Ocean Next, Scalian, partners in the AI OCEANIX chaire, which aims to gain a better understanding of ocean dynamics and develop high-performance monitoring and surveillance tools to address issues such as the impact of extreme weather events, the monitoring of fishing activities, the surveillance of maritime areas and marine renewable energies.
  • Kelio is a founding partner of the ArchOps II Chaire, which focuses on software architecture engineering, one of the major challenges of agile IT, and is aimed in particular at IMT Atlantique students in the IT department, with a view to training them in this discipline.
  • Airbus Defence and Space, Amossys, BNP Paribas, EDF and SNCF partners of the Cyber CNI Chaire, dedicated to the cybersecurity of critical infrastructures.
  • EDF and Orano, partners in the Storage chaire, dedicated to the scientific and societal challenges of storing radioactive waste, with a view to developing a sustainable conditioning and containment system.
  • Akajoule and Enedis, partners in the ValaDoE Chaire, dedicated to the design, deployment and operation of the energy networks of the future. 
  • Naval group, Thales partners in the Cyberdefense of Naval Systems Chaire, which aims to explore and propose new approaches and tools to protect these complex systems in the naval sector.

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions, if you'd like to be supported in an industrial chaire project or to be put in touch with IMT Atlantique's research teams. Contact relations-entreprises@imt-atlantique.fr

Projet de recherche en partenariat avec une entreprise Partenariat avec Naval Group