Pierre Gohar
In 1986, after defending his PhD thesis in Industrial Process Engineering at the École des Mines, he joined the CEA (French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), initially at the Fontenay-aux-Roses Nuclear Research Center, and later at the Le Ripault Center (Military Applications Directorate). In 1992, he was seconded from the CEA to ANVAR, where he supported local SMEs in their innovation strategies.
In 1995, he founded and managed the startup New Option Wood (SA NOW), which developed and industrialized a breakthrough innovation: a high-temperature wood transformation process under a controlled atmosphere. He sold his shares after more than three years of managing the company’s growth and the creation of three production sites.
After a year dedicated to transferring this technology to the PINAULT BOIS et MATÉRIAUX group and a German-Dutch consortium, he was appointed in 1998 as Deputy Director of Technology Transfer at the CEA, focusing specifically on the creation of spin-offs.
In 2000, he created and managed an innovative business incubator for seven years. During this time, he analyzed over 300 projects—examining their success factors and reasons for failure—which led him to co-develop an innovative systemic analysis method for startup projects with Skema Business School. This method was later developed and commercialized by the company VIANEO, of which he is a co-founder.
From March 2008 to 2010, he served as Director of Technology Transfer at the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC), where he helped develop an Innovation Center dedicated to maturing innovative projects, accelerating their transformation into economic reality through agility, speed, and frugality. He also established a university foundation to fund this initiative.
He joined the CNRS in 2010, where he held the position of Director of Innovation and Business Relations until September 2013. He optimized the management of the intellectual property portfolio (4,500 patents, 1,000 licenses) and implemented an innovation strategy tailored to the evolving national research landscape (including the co-creation of 14 local technology transfer companies—SATTs—where he served as a board member). He also redefined partnership rules with major industrial accounts to optimize scaling-up and innovation transfer conditions.
In late 2013, he was appointed Director of Innovation and Business Relations at Paris-Saclay University. In this role, he contributed to building a fertile ecosystem for the birth and transfer of innovations from university laboratories or student-led projects (creating a €50M seed fund, establishing a Chair in Frugal Engineering, and launching a pre-maturation program for research results).
In October 2017, he founded WISIM SAS, a company dedicated to supporting industrial firms in defining their innovation strategies, building open innovation partnerships, and transferring technologies with a focus on speed, agility, frugality, and a strong international dimension. Together with a group of experts, he developed WISEPRO, an original methodology for business pivoting based on company assets. This method has been successfully applied to several companies in the aeronautics sector.
In January 2022, he joined the Association des Instituts Carnot, which represents French research excellence dedicated to industrial innovation. He developed and implemented the "Challenge Experts" program, which facilitates one-day meetings between academic and corporate experts to identify major innovation topics and encourage companies to engage in R&D partnerships.
