The Thales Design Journey - From Trial Run to a Global Design Center Network

Didier Boulet’s proposal was personal and practical: he wanted to create a design centre inside Thales. The company had gained experience with design thinking through a collaboration with Stanford’s d.school. He wanted to bring that approach into everyday work. A sponsor agreed to give the idea a year. If it worked, they would continue. If it did not, they would have learned something.

The experiment grew beyond the single centre Boulet had imagined. In this episode of Innovation Rockstars, Thales’ Group Chief Design Officer joins Dr. Christian Mühlroth to explain how demand from colleagues helped turn one team into a network. The conversation explores what made the approach credible, how the centres shared methods without becoming identical and why insights gathered during innovation can still disappear on the way into engineering. For Boulet, the test is what happens across the full project.

Prove the value through real work

Boulet describes a technology-driven company becoming more receptive to different approaches to innovation. Business models and user needs were gaining attention alongside technical capability. That created an opening for the design centre.

The first year had a clear priority: demonstrate value. Early work included developing the centre’s identity, explaining the offer and building relationships. Workshops, projects and training followed, giving the team outcomes it could show.

The centre also adopted an internal agency model, charging other parts of the group for its services. Boulet saw this as a way to build an operation sustained by demand for useful work. If colleagues wanted projects, the team had a reason to continue.

That commercial discipline did not settle every question about impact, but it made the need for relevance concrete. The centre had to offer something business teams were willing to use.

Protect the difference between a workshop and a project

Boulet wanted the team to practise design thinking across complete projects. Workshops were part of that work, but they were insufficient on their own.

“Design thinking is about the project.”

He describes a multidisciplinary approach that moves between exploring a problem and narrowing towards a response. Creative activity belongs within that process, alongside attention to the different dimensions of the challenge.

Maintaining some independence mattered. Boulet worried that absorption into another team could reduce the approach to a smaller set of activities and undermine its integrity.

For R&D leaders, the distinction is useful when commissioning design support. A workshop can generate ideas or help a group align. A full project gives the team time to investigate users, test assumptions and develop a response. Expecting the latter from the former creates a mismatch before the work begins.

Let demand reveal where to expand

The first centre attracted particular interest from marketing and service teams. Then innovation colleagues began asking whether they could adopt the same concept, receive training and use the name.

Boulet recalls five centres after three years. The team had expected to build one. He describes the initial expansion as an internal franchise: a shared brand, methods and guidance, with local teams applying them in their own settings.

As the group grew, that arrangement evolved into a more connected network. At the time of the interview, Boulet described 13 centres sharing resources, routines and projects. Those figures belong to his account of the programme then, rather than a current inventory.

The shift reflects a different management challenge. Helping a few teams get started is not the same as enabling a larger group to learn and deliver together. Connections that can remain informal early on need more deliberate support as participation expands.

Share the foundation and leave room for specialist work

Boulet explains how a common repository and a design system helped make methods, working spaces and service offers visible across the network.

The offer had several levels. Core design-thinking and service-design capabilities belonged in every centre. More specialised work depended on particular skills. An incubation area allowed a small number of centres to explore something new before deciding whether to spread it further.

This arrangement gave teams a shared foundation without requiring every location to offer everything. It also made experimentation easier to see and discuss.

One example involved using design fiction to explore relationships between people and AI. The team drew on portrayals in books and films as material for discussion. Boulet presents that work as a source of inspiration and language. It should not be confused with evidence that fictional technologies will become reality.

Keep user insight alive through engineering

Boulet describes an airport baggage-scanning project that brought together technology and the passenger journey. The challenge reached beyond the technical system to the experience around it.

That broader view also shapes his ambition for a design continuum. The aim is to connect design thinking, user experience, industrial design and service design so that understanding gained early in innovation survives later development.

“What is acquired in terms of insight and design during the innovation phases is not lost when you go to the engineering side of things.”

He also recognises limits to a purely user-centred perspective on large, complex systems. Systems thinking and strategic foresight can widen the discussion. Foresight, in particular, helps teams consider several possible futures rather than assume a single official view of what comes next.

The original one-year experiment therefore leads to a larger question than how many centres a company can establish. Can the organisation preserve what it learns about people as ideas move between teams, disciplines and development stages? Boulet’s account suggests that shared methods help, but credibility still rests on projects where colleagues can see the approach making a useful difference.