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Having begun its life as a Thales in-house start-up in 2015, Heropolis spent over two years developing a collaborative security app for citizens to help to make their cities safer. Today, Heropolis flies the coup: zoom on the intrapreneurship at Thales.

Key Points

• Heropolis, collaborative security app for citizens, is the first Thales’s internal start-up to fly the coup.
• New leverage of growth and innovation, Thales plans on intrapreneurship to foster employees’ creativity and offer them new and exciting experiences.
• The Group adopts a strategy of accompaniment of these internal startups on case by case basis, depending on their needs to be integrated into the Group as a fully-fledged business area or, in certain cases, to spin off as an independent business.

In today’s constantly evolving threat environment, communities everywhere need to protect their public spaces to keep people safe and allow emergency services to stay in control of any situation with the help of the general public.

To enhance urban security, which is a critical challenge for cities and citizens alike, Heropolis developed a secure app that allows authorised individuals (security personnel and members of the public in risky situations, shopkeepers, engaged citizens, etc.) to keep authorities informed of evolving situations by issuing real-time alerts with geolocation complemented by other rich contextual information. With this kind of human intelligence, emergency services have a better understanding of situations on the ground, enabling them to respond faster and more effectively to incidents as well as plan longer-term strategies.

Heropolis is a Thales success story in the fostering of talents and in helping startups get off the ground. The Heropolis team began as a group of talented Thales employees who devised a collaborative security app, and entered it in one of the many internal in-house contests in 2015. The technology was selected for continued development as one of Thales’s first start-ups, for them to turn their idea into reality. Their project competed in an in-house contest in 2015, In mid-2017, the Heropolis team moved to the final in-house stage, taking their project to the Digital Factory, Thales's new accelerator, for an incubation period before becoming an independent company in the first part of 2018.
 

“Being associated to Thales’s initiative of intrapreneurship has been a chance for our team. Through this approach, we have been able to imagine new ways of working together, new ways of organising our work, new ways of communicating with our users to offer them solutions, always more adapted to their needs.”
Jean-Yves Ingea, in charge of Heropolis

This new way of working enriches the Group’s perspectives as it leverages growth and innovation by fostering employees’ creativity whilst offering them new and exciting experiences through the creation of new products and services at the heart of Thales’s core business. The Group adopts a strategy of accompaniment of these internal startups on case by case basis, depending on their needs. Each is fostered in its inception and initial evolution with both operational support from areas like human resources and finance, as well as more value added services such as client introductions and networking, and technology intelligence. This support is provided until the entity is able to stand on its own two feet, to be integrated into the Group as a fully-fledged business area or, in certain cases, to spin off as an independent business.  

Thales has an active policy of support for external and internal start-ups focused on leveraging complementary technologies to drive innovation. Heropolis is now working closely with two other Thales in-house start-ups — Citadel (trusted instant messaging service for professionals) and Eiji (secure, resilient mobile network operator) — offering a powerful illustration of this pragmatic approach to value creation for customers.