Renault Trucks opens a CampX partnership factory on its Lyon site

Renault Trucks is inaugurating CampX, a new facility dedicated to innovation and collaboration at its Lyon site. CampX by Volvo Group concept – which already exists in Sweden, India and the USA – is now being implemented in France. The mission is to accelerate technological and business innovation by connecting internal teams with external partners, principally startups. 

Technology is evolving at a high pace, and it is crucial to keep up with the latest cutting-edge developments for sustainable mobility to stay relevant and competitive. CampX Lyon caters for an ecosystem of startups, which have been selected on the basis of three pillars - decarbonisation, urban logistics and uptime. Through innovative cooperation, CampX aims to create even more efficient technical solutions, products and services to meet the challenges of the future.

Located at the heart of Renault Trucks' headquarters in Lyon, CampX by Volvo Group has been designed to accelerate technological and business innovation by providing space and tools that enable Renault Trucks' experts to work closely with startups and partner companies. 

“At Renault Trucks, innovation and collaboration are key drivers for business”, explained Marc Bourgeois, Head of CampX Lyon. “Putting our experts together with partner startups allows us to accelerate innovation and come up with new solutions that will benefit not only Renault Trucks' customers, but also the industry and the society as a whole”. 

Seven partnership agreements already signed 

With seven "win-win" partnership agreements already signed and some thirty companies in its portfolio, CampX Lyon has already proven its effectiveness. 

“One of the use cases we’re working on aims to drastically reduce truck downtime due to wiring problems”, explained Marc Bourgeois. “The sharing of knowledge and technology between the chosen startup and our experts has resulted in an innovative solution to improve the productivity of our network and thus contribute to improve our customers’ vehicles uptime.”

A pragmatic approach

“The CampX team is open for requests from Renault Trucks colleagues who are looking for technological or business opportunities together with partners. Once the two parties are matched, they can potentially form a partnership to collaborate and quickly find technical solutions”, said Marc Bourgeois. 

Designed to resemble a mini-campus, CampX Lyon features 400 m² of facilities suitable for collaboration, including creativity room, social area, mini-amphitheatre and workstations, where Renault Trucks teams and startups can work side-by-side during the co-construction period. Everything is connected using the latest technology.  

Created in 2019 by the Volvo Group, to which Renault Trucks belongs, the CampX concept is also being rolled out at Volvo Group sites in Gothenburg (Sweden), Bangalore (India) and Greensboro (USA). To date, CampX has enabled over 50 startups throughout the world to collaborate with the Volvo Group.