Genesis of SOSENS R&D

Bernard Controls is a French industrial company manufacturing electric actuators for valve automation. Number one in nuclear applications the company also owns a leadership position in Oil and Gas, Cement, Water industries, etc. With Operating Units worldwide including 4 in Asia, Bernard Controls is a fast growing medium size enterprise facing challenges of internationalization from 2010. With 75 years history in industrial applications and family shareholders, Bernard Controls always aims sustainable developments wherever the company invests and develops.

The creation of Research and Development about Social Sensibility in 2011 has been an answer found by Bernard Controls to internationalization and fast growth challenges in order to keep developing the company DNA oriented on innovation, people and performance. As the fastest growth is coming from Asia, the first R&D department about Social Sensibility has been created in the Chinese subsidiary where incomes and the team were growing the quickest.

This innovative R&D department has been created thanks to the meeting between Alessandro Rolandi,  an artist whose work is focused on a discipline recently developed in the contemporary art world named “social practice”, and Guillaume Bernard, third generation of founder. Mr Rolandi was first invited as an artist in residence to continue his research of redefining the work place as a "lieu" in which frontiers between artists-management-employees are blurred. Then the Social Sensibility R&D department, founded and directed by Alessandro Rolandi, focuses on the orientation of artistic inquiries to discover and suggest new models and creative approaches to protect, improve and valorize human sensibility within the working environment. As traditional industrial R&D centers aim to develop new products and solutions for customers, this specific R&D department uses specific methodologies to focus on the development of people’s sensibility.

Company shareholders and management believe that sensibility is the key to enhance intelligence, but a contradiction rises because the development of sensibility is inhibited by both fast growth and strict rational thinking, two elements that every corporation needs to constantly deal with in order to obtain its mandatory short-term and long term profits.

Bernard Controls has decided to invest in this contradiction, embracing its challenges and its potential  as          a chance to study new social models for the future to come. Sensibility can be the invisible thread to develop positive and creative human relationships and to foster a long term vision based on innovation and sustainability.

The Research and Developments about Social Sensibility explores the roots of creativity, human relationships, individual freewill and society development.