Laurence Montanari brings nearly 30 years of automotive engineering and business experience to the largest of Dassault Systèmes’ 11 industries of focus, following a career at the French multinational automobile manufacturer Groupe Renault, where she began as a mechanical engineer in 1992.  

At Groupe Renault – senior innovation manager of its in-house LCI (Collaborative Innovation Laboratory) – she led experimental projects, Renault EZ FLEX, to address emerging trends and develop disruptive mobility solutions for urban areas, including an electric vehicle aimed to understand the last-mile delivery of goods, by creating an atypical innovation ecosystem and driving the adoption of cloud-based technologies.  

This involved bringing together and spearheading a virtual value network of project stakeholders from engineering, design and product marketing disciplines – each with their own challenges – to facilitate open innovation and collaboration around a vehicle’s digital model.  Project stakeholders had the opportunity and autonomy to engage in a new digital “test and learn” experience with dashboard managers, powerful realistic rendering images, urban delivery web monitoring, and virtual visualization with a headset but without data transfer or processing.

Laurence Montanari holds a mechanical engineering degree in robotics from the Ecole Centrale de Nantes in France.