D&Consultants

This innovation strategy and financing consultancy, which has been a partner of Valorial since 2018, has just been selected by Bpifrance to join their first Paris Region accelerator. Interview with Dominique Carlac’h, its president and founder.

What is your core business and what markets are you targeting?

Founded more than 29 years ago, D&Consultants is a company specialised in strategy consulting and innovation financing. Our activities include setting up and managing innovation projects (collaborative R&D projects and platforms) and conducting economic, strategic and marketing studies. Our robust and proven expertise enables us to support general management, R&D, finance, innovation and marketing departments in national and international missions aimed at accelerating growth and increasing the competitiveness of companies.

We have a national presence with an office in the Ile de France and a client base throughout France. We have a turnover of nearly €4.5M, which has been growing steadily for several years.

In addition, since 2016, D&Consultants has been involved in a CSR approach aiming to improve the overall performance of its organisation by seeking the right balance between economic efficiency, environmental preservation, territorial anchoring and social equity. As such, and following our evaluation by Afnor in 2016, we have the “confirmed” CSR level.

D&Consultants is also a founding member and President of the professional organisation ACI, Association des Conseils en Innovation, which brings together 4,000 consultants in 70 companies.

And your news?

In 2019, D&Consultants obtained the Bpi Excellence label for its performance and growth potential.

To continue this momentum, we have also been selected in 2020 by Bpifrance to integrate their 1st accelerator in the Paris region.

Why did you join the Valorial Partners Club?

We chose to become a member of the Valorial Partner Club because we have a real common DNA with the cluster, based on 3 key elements :

• Agri-food: nearly 30% of our customers are from the agri-food sector. Among them, naturally, are members and adherents of Valorial
• The region: we have strong regional roots in the west of France, and the desire to continue to develop proximity with local companies
• Innovation: which is our core business. Our wish is to continue to share our know-how and expertise with the companies that need it

What is your vision of innovation?

Innovation is our core business, our know-how and our expertise. Every day we help companies to carry out their innovation projects and advise them on the strategies to adopt in order to remove the uncertainties and risks on investments associated with innovation and diversification.

For us, it is important that they can keep control of their production capacity, which implies the ability to design their products and production tools, while at the same time derisking their innovation processes.

When we talk about innovation, we are also talking about social and managerial innovation, which is a competitive asset for all companies. Within D&Consultants, this is reflected in the parity between men and women, the regular organisation of conferences for the teams with personalities representing the world of entrepreneurship, or the setting up of sports and cultural activities, including the financing of registrations for charity sports events.