Philippe Dewost

Why organisations work with Philippe Dewost

• He has run digital transformation from inside the state. As director of a €4.25 billion programme at Caisse des Dépôts, he is one of the few practitioners who can speak to public capital, regulation, and operating execution as a single problem.
• He authored the 2013 report that produced La French Tech. Leaders briefing him on ecosystem strategy are talking to the person who designed one.
• He built LaBChain, the 27-partner blockchain consortium at Caisse des Dépôts, before most boards had a working vocabulary for distributed ledgers. His material on blockchain is mechanism-first, not hype.
• He has operated at every layer of the stack: co-founder of Wanadoo, CEO of a Cambridge startup acquired by Apple, head of Leonard at VINCI, director general of a French engineering school. The same person has shipped consumer products, sold technology to Apple, and built a national policy instrument.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder of Wanadoo, France Telecom’s consumer internet service, which became Europe’s leading ISP at peak.
• Former CEO of imSense (Cambridge), the image-processing company acquired by Apple in 2010.
• Director of a €4.25 billion digital programme at Caisse des Dépôts under France’s Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir.
• Author of the 2013 report to the French Prime Minister that gave rise to La French Tech, announced in January 2014.
• Founder of LaBChain, a 27-partner blockchain R&D consortium led from Caisse des Dépôts.
• Director of Leonard, VINCI Group’s corporate innovation and foresight programme; led EPITA, the IT and cybersecurity engineering school; author of “De Mémoire Vive” (2022), preface by Cédric Villani.

Biography

Wanadoo was an internal France Telecom project in 1995 when Philippe Dewost helped build its product management. Four years later it was Europe’s leading internet service provider with over a million subscribers. That early experience set the pattern: technology only matters when it reaches operating scale and the institutions around it learn to govern it.

After running imSense, the Cambridge image-processing company acquired by Apple in 2010, he joined Caisse des Dépôts in 2011 to direct a €4.25 billion digital investment package under France’s Programme d’Investissements d’Avenir. In 2013 he authored the report to the Prime Minister that became the design document for La French Tech, the initiative launched in January 2014 with €215 million of public funding. He then built LaBChain, a 27-partner blockchain consortium that became one of Europe’s earliest serious cross-sector experiments in distributed ledgers.

At VINCI Group from 2017 he ran Leonard, the corporate innovation and foresight programme, leading exploration across autonomous vehicles, climate resilience, AI and four other long-horizon topics. The intrapreneurship engine he built there is now a reference model for other large corporates. From October 2021 he ran EPITA, the IONIS Group engineering school, focusing it on cybersecurity and on a presence at the cyber campus in La Défense. He is also Operating Partner at C4 Ventures, Pascal Cagni’s consumer high-tech fund, and sits on the board of agritech firm SunR.

His 2022 book “De Mémoire Vive”, with a foreword by mathematician Cédric Villani, is a personal history of the digital revolution by someone who was inside several of its turning points. It was published with 42 unique NFT-numbered first editions, an editorial choice that says something about the author’s instinct for where the technology is going next.

Key speaking topics

• Digital sovereignty
• Blockchain as institutional infrastructure
• Corporate innovation and intrapreneurship at scale
• Building national technology ecosystems
• Cybersecurity as a strategic capability
• Artificial intelligence in operating environments
• Smart cities and autonomous mobility
• The history and trajectory of the digital revolution

Ideal for

• Board members and CEOs setting digital, AI or sovereignty strategy at a European scale
• CIOs, CTOs and Chief Innovation Officers moving from pilots into operating deployment
• Public sector leaders and policy teams designing ecosystem or industrial policy in technology
• Corporate venture and innovation leads building intrapreneurship and partnership engines

Audience outcomes

• A working mental model of how digital ambition translates into operating capability, with named examples from French and European programmes.
• A clear-eyed read on blockchain as a coordination mechanism between institutions, not as a product category.
• A senior practitioner’s view of where corporate innovation programmes succeed and where they stall.
• A specific framing of digital sovereignty that boards can use to interrogate vendor, infrastructure and talent dependencies.