Mehdi GmarDeputy CEO for Innovation
The CNRS has appointed Mehdi Gmar as its Deputy CEO for Innovation as of March 1st 2025 to drive and support technology transfer for research results and transform these into innovations to benefit business and society alike. He thus becomes part of the CNRS General Management Board. The CNRS Innovation Office (DGDI) he now heads works alongside the Chairman and CEO and implements CNRS policy on the transfer of research results while managing the organisation's interactions with the socio-economic sphere. To achieve this, the DGDI coordinates the work of the Business Relations Department (DRE), CNRS Innovation, our network of technology transfer engineers and network of partnership and technology transfer units. More broadly, the DGDI works with all CNRS entities involved in the commercialisation process.
After an engineering degree in physics and a PhD in nuclear instrumentation, Mehdi Gmar began his career at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) where he spent 20 years supervising instrumentation research and then managing technological research for business innovation.
Next, his career moved closer to the institutional ecosystem made up of public stakeholders and France's regions as he successively joined the General Secretariat for Investment (SGPI, formerly CGI) in 2016 as deputy programme director for research promotion then the CEA again in 2019 as director of the CEA Tech Technology Dissemination Institute in the regions. In 2021, he joined the cabinet of Frédérique Vidal, the then Minister of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, as an advisor in charge of research and industry.
In June 2022, he was appointed as the director of CNRS Innovation whose mission is to protect results obtained by CNRS laboratories through intellectual property rights, manage the portfolio of patents and software resulting from the labs' work and technology transfer to the socio-economic sphere. This CNRS branch steers the CNRS prematurity programme which celebrated its 10th anniversary last year along with RISE, our start-up creation support program (RISE). More recently, CNRS Innovation began managing the new CNRS support programmes, OPEN which promotes open-source software and PISE which promotes projects with a societal and/or environmental impact.
The CNRS is a key player in innovation in France and abroad with a portfolio of over 7000 patent families (with a third being jointly filed with industry), 24 framework agreements with companies of all sizes, over 280 operational CNRS/company joint research structures, over 1000 new research contracts with companies each year and the annual creation of over 100 start-ups per year.