Frédéric Arnoux
Environment

Frédéric Arnoux

Founder and DirectorStim

Why Business Leaders Need to (Re)Become Entrepreneurs

10:44·24 October 2025

This article was automatically translated from its original Français version. Read the original

Frédéric Arnoux is the founder and director of Stim, a spin-off from a laboratory at the École des Mines de Paris that aims to help business leaders regain a pioneering spirit and encourage creative teams to innovate and invent the products of tomorrow.

"When I started with Stim, there was really a glass ceiling between the teams that were creating and inventing the products of tomorrow in companies, and the leaders of those companies,” recalls Frédéric Arnoux. 

These leaders are not there by chance. They are very good decision-makers and managers. But when it comes to having a vision, sometimes risk management clashes with creativity and imagination. 

What Stim seeks to do is to awaken or ignite that little spark and to question these leaders about the future of their company, about what they want to create tomorrow. “We will provide them with tools that allow them to be good entrepreneurs, good designers,” explains Frédéric Arnoux. “In these cases, what we need to rediscover is that pioneering spirit, that entrepreneurial mindset. And for that, we need to tap into another realm, that of emotion. If we are in the rational, we won't invent the car of tomorrow.” 

And Stim helps them realize their visions, implement them, and launch the offers and products of tomorrow, "creating the sustainable and desirable industries of tomorrow,” which facilitate and support the environmental transition.

By definition, our job is to move the lines. A company only calls us when it wants to move the lines. We create the new categories of objects for tomorrow. For example, if you work with home appliances, the question you will ask is, "What does a washing machine that lasts 100 years look like? What would that mean? How do I rethink the washing machine like that? That's how you reinvent a category of objects. So indeed, by definition, it's about moving the lines,” concludes Frédéric Arnoux. 

Florence Jaillet
impact.info journalist
Published on 24 October 2025