Bruno Sportisse

A graduate of École polytechnique and École nationale des ponts et chaussées, Bruno Sportisse engineer general of the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées, he also holds a PhD in applied mathematics and a research habilitation in applied mathematics.

His scientific career has been devoted to the digital simulation of the environment. After a thesis (1999) on the reduction of large-scale dynamic systems, he focuses his researcher on the numerical simulation of reactive flows by founding (2001) and then running an atmospheric environment laboratory on the atmospheric environment, jointly run by Ecole des Ponts and EDF. From the outset, his research activity was firmly rooted in Inria, as he coordinated an Inria "concerted research action" on data assimilation in geophysics, which foreshadowed the creation of the CLIME project-team in 2003.

Director of Transfer and Innovation at Inria from 2008 to 2012, he set up a number of transfer and industrial partnership support schemes, including the precursor of LabComs, initiated at Inria (i-Lab scheme), and was the first Director of the Inria Carnot Institute.From 2008 to 2012, Bruno Sportisse has been Director of Transfer and Innovation at Inria. During this a number of transfer support schemes, such as the precursor of Labcoms the precursor of Labcoms, initiated at Inria (i-Lab scheme), and was the first Director of the Inria Carnot Institute.

In 2012, he became digital and innovation advisor to the Minister of Higher Education and Research, Geneviève Fioraso, then, in 2013, deputy chief of staff to the Minister for the Digital Economy, SMEs and Innovation, Fleur Pellerin. With her, he coordinated the interministerial plan Une nouvelle donne pour l'innovation, of which the launch of French Tech, following on from the Ambition logicielle initiative launched at Inria, was one measure.

In 2014, Bruno Sportisse became deputy CEO of Thuasne, a mid-sized company specializing in medical devices, where he initiated the company's digital transformation. In 2016, he took the entrepreneurial plunge with the creation of Skopai, a startup combining artificial intelligence and automatic language processing, in partnership with the Grenoble Computer Science Laboratory (LIG, Grenoble-Alpes University), a startup of which he was CEO until his arrival as President of Inria in June 2018.

At the end of 2017, he was commissioned by Frédérique Vidal, Bruno Le Maire, Mounir Mahjoubi and Florence Parly, the ministers responsible for Research, the Economy, the Digital Economy and Defense, to propose the creation of a European Agency for Disruptive Innovation, in conjunction with the establishment of the European Innovation Council (EIC) within the European R&D framework program. From the creation of the EIC in 2019 until autumn 2023, Bruno Sportisse is a member of its advisory board.