Overview
At Thales, innovation happens across countries, business units, and highly specialized technical domains. As AI became an increasing strategic focus across the organization, teams needed a scalable way to coordinate innovation initiatives, engage employees globally, and move ideas forward collaboratively.
To support these efforts, Thales uses Spring, the internal name for the HYPE Innovation platform. Spring provides a centralized environment for running hackathons, operational excellence programs, technical campaigns, and open innovation initiatives across the organization.
Spring serves as a shared collaboration environment connecting employees, technical experts, customers, and external partners across multiple innovation models.
The Challenge
As innovation initiatives expanded globally, Thales needed a more structured way to:
- Coordinate campaigns across distributed teams and geographies
- Centralize idea collection and evaluation
- Increase visibility into innovation activities
- Support different innovation models within one environment
- Enable collaboration between employees who would not typically work together
The challenge extended beyond collecting ideas. Teams needed a way to engage participants at scale, support real-time collaboration, and create momentum around innovation initiatives tied to AI, cybersecurity, operational improvement, and customer-focused innovation.
The Approach
Thales used Spring as a centralized environment for innovation initiatives across multiple use cases. Internally described as simple and intuitive, the platform helped lower the barrier to participation while enabling global teams to collaborate in real time.
Spring supported:
- Centralized idea collection
- Team formation around ideas
- Comments, reactions, and real-time collaboration
- Visibility into submissions and evaluation
- Confidential workflows for restricted initiatives
The platform also gave teams the flexibility to run very different types of innovation initiatives within the same environment, from large-scale AI hackathons to focused technical challenges and open innovation programs.
Visual assets developed to promote the Thales I/O Days Hackathon across the organization.
The Initiatives
I/O Days Hackathon 2026
One of the largest recent initiatives was the I/O Days Hackathon 2026, launched to explore how agentic AI could support new forms of business value across Thales. The two-month initiative engaged employees globally and generated strong participation across the organization.
Results included:
- 287 participants
- 13 countries represented
- 96 submitted ideas
- 5 shortlisted concepts
- 3 winning ideas presented to leadership
Winning concepts focused on:
- AI-augmented dashboards
- AI-enhanced satellite capabilities
- AI-driven code bug detection and review
Beyond idea generation, the initiative created new working relationships between employees across business units and geographies who would not typically collaborate. Teams formed organically around ideas, creating new connections across the organization in real time.
“Openness, collaboration, and frugal innovation drive our Hackathon. With Spring, we’re accelerating the Thales I/O Days ideation phase, fostering powerful synergies among our engineers to transform their ideas into groundbreaking digital solutions.”
– Marius Moulis, Thales InnerSource Program Office Leader and Thales I/O Days Co-founder
Operational Excellence Awards
Since 2018, the platform has supported Thales’ operational excellence awards program, an initiative that has been running for more than a decade.
The initiative gives employees a structured way to submit projects and improvement ideas while helping organizers evaluate, recognize, and scale successful outcomes internally.
Product Security and Bug Discovery Campaigns
The platform also supported focused technical initiatives tied to product quality and cybersecurity.
One campaign invited participants to identify vulnerabilities and bugs within products through a structured challenge process. These initiatives included confidential workflows where only campaign managers and reviewers could access submissions.
The campaigns demonstrated how Spring could support highly targeted technical collaboration alongside broader enterprise innovation initiatives.
Open Innovation with Universities and Customers
Thales extended these innovation efforts to universities and customers through structured open innovation initiatives.
These programs included onboarding sessions, coaching, structured ideation workflows, and evaluation processes designed to bring external perspectives into the innovation process.
These initiatives gave Thales additional opportunities to explore new applications tied to its technologies while strengthening collaboration across its broader innovation ecosystem.
The Results
Across these initiatives, Spring helped Thales coordinate innovation activities across countries, business units, and technical domains through one centralized environment.
Key outcomes included:
- High employee engagement across global teams
- Cross-functional collaboration between business units
- Global participation spanning more than 13 countries
- Increased visibility into innovation activities
- Structured evaluation and selection workflows
- New working relationships formed through campaigns
- Continued development of selected AI concepts beyond the hackathon phase
Together, these initiatives demonstrated how the Spring platform supports multiple innovation models simultaneously, from enterprise-wide AI exploration and operational excellence programs to focused technical challenges and open innovation initiatives.
“Spring became a catalyst for innovation across Thales by making it easier for teams across countries and business units to connect around ideas, collaborate in real time, and advance innovative initiatives into products.”
– Sébastien Lejeune, Thales Open Source Program Office Director
Key Questions to Ask Your Employees
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