The days of paper-base man­age­ment or white boards or wall past­ed sched­ules in meet­ing rooms and cor­ri­dors are over, replaced by tru­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive work – wit­ness what is pro­posed by Ubikey inside UTC. 

Ubikey first­ly was an idea launched in 2009 in the con­text of the UTC-Costech tac­tile table project. The obser­va­tion made was that exist­ing dig­i­tal inter­faces did not lend them­selves to col­lab­o­ra­tive work. In 2013 a col­lab­o­ra­tion with Air­bus Defence and Space began. They want­ed to devel­op a tool to meet their spe­cif­ic col­lab­o­ra­tive needs. The project Ubikey was sup­port­ed finan­cial­ly by Bpifrance and the com­pa­ny offi­cial­ly reg­is­tered in July 2015. Today the start­up has 10 staff and has some major French industrial/commercial cus­tomers in its port­fo­lio, e.g., EDF or Sanofi. “In essence Ubikey is a dig­i­tized ver­sion of tra­di­tion­al brain­storm­ing that we used to do with paper, pen­cils and post-its. We imag­ined the most nat­ur­al tool we could so as to take ion a project at a glance on a large tac­tile screen”, explains Pierre Chi­quet, tech­ni­cal man­ag­er for Ubikey. This inter­ac­tive tool retains the flex­i­bil­i­ty of paper but has the added advan­tage of dig­i­tal tech­niques, such as trace­abil­i­ty and acces­si­bil­i­ty of all data and an opti­miza­tion of occu­pa­tion of work spaces and meet­ing rooms; “Our solu­tion was high­ly attrac­tive to the com­pa­nies we approached, espe­cial­ly the major indus­tri­al groups, inas­much as it enhances cre­ativ­i­ty, project man­age­ments and prob­lem-solv­ing in a entre­pre­neur­ial con­text. Visu­al Man­age­ment is now becom­ing wide­spread prac­tice in the major groups. The key idea is to use a very visu­al tool that enables col­leagues to share the lev­el of advance­ment of a giv­en project, to improve their com­mu­ni­ca­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion and to sim­pli­fy the deci­sion mak­ing process.”