Helen Havlak

Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in L'Oreal working with startups outside.

And it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech.

So we do all those partnerships and our team is responsible for them.

And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page and now how can we bring beauty and tech together?

At the beginning, I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech.

So we're really tech centric.

And then over time, we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech.

And so we have a little bit more kind of.

process behind how we choose projects now.

We try and kind of do things like upgrading the hairdryer to be able to do three out of four people have a hairdryer at home.

And so how can we make it better?

Or this year, like the flat irons that we're using and LED masks and stuff like that.

So we do have a little bit of that kind of process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity.

So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think of some new clever ideas too.

We're going to start with a Decoder classic question, Guy.

What does tech and open innovation mean at L'Oreal?

Who is on your team?

What kind of projects do you work on?

How do you decide which projects to invest in?