Designing the future from Day One: meet Sandrine Chabanet, Innovation Hubs Director and ESG Innovation Champion
As Soitec's Innovation Hubs Director, Sandrine leads an international team of 130 permanent employees across five sites. Her teams support the development of new technologies, from prototype manufacturing and characterization to the financial management of innovation activities.
An INSA Lyon materials engineer with a PhD in metallurgy completed for the European Space Agency, Sandrine is also a Jaguar-certified Green Belt Lean Six Sigma and holds an Executive MBA from INSEAD. She held several leadership positions in heavy industry before joining Soitec in 2019 with a clear mission: to structure the newly created Innovation department.
Today, as Soitec’s designated ESG Innovation Champion, she also helps integrate environmental considerations from the very first stages of technology development. Because innovation is central to the Group’s growth, Soitec has chosen to report on it voluntarily as part of its CSRD1 disclosures.
Integrating Sustainability into Innovation from the start
For many years, R&D decisions were primarily driven by three criteria: performance, cost and timing. Working closely with the Sustainability teams, Sandrine’s department added a fourth dimension: the environment and the circular economy.
"Innovation sits at the crossroads of customer needs, the work carried out by leading research institutes and future high-volume manufacturing," Sandrine explains. "At this early stage, we still have the greatest freedom to choose materials, favour those with the most positive life cycle assessment and avoid hazardous substances or supply chain risks. If these choices are not challenged early enough, changing a technology later can become extremely complex and may even mean losing an entire market."
To put this approach into practice, her teams have gradually introduced new environmental considerations into their day-to-day ways of working. As part of the “Greenovation” initiative, sensors have been installed on selected equipment in Bernin. They measure water and electricity consumption at individual machine level during the development phase.
Environmental impact is also considered when purchasing new equipment. Every capital expenditure proposal now includes a dedicated environmental review, comparing the footprint of the new machine with that of the equipment it replaces before any investment decision is made.
In addition, Scope 1, 2 and 3 indicators have been incorporated into the different Product Life Cycle milestones. The environmental impact of a technology is therefore assessed throughout its development, from the earliest design choices through to industrialization.
Bringing the Innovation Hubs Together as One Team
Among the progress made in recent years, Sandrine is particularly proud of the strong connections created between the different Innovation Hubs. Teams in Singapore, Le Bourget-du-Lac, Grenoble, Belgium and Bernin now work as part of a unified international network, where knowledge, experience, and best practices are shared more easily.
From an environmental perspective, her greatest satisfaction is having helped drive a deeper change in the way decisions are made: today, no capital investment is approved without first assessing its environmental impact.
Looking ahead to fiscal year 2026-2027, Sandrine wants to go one step further and turn this data into a real commercial asset. She is working to provide sales teams with comparative life cycle assessment data, enabling them to better demonstrate the environmental performance of Soitec’s technologies to customers.
Although carbon footprint is not yet the leading consideration in every market, Sandrine is convinced that the ability to measure and demonstrate the relative environmental performance of our technologies will help Soitec prepare for the future and stay ahead of the curve.
Achieving performance without losing sight of what matters
When asked what drives her work every day, Sandrine focuses entirely on people and collective efficiency.
"What motivates me is achieving our objectives while protecting everyone’s well-being," she says warmly. "When we perform well and move forward with mutual respect, help people grow and still find time to laugh together, that is when I feel we have truly succeeded.”
1 Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive
