Benjamin Chaminade

Hello, I’m Benjamin Chaminade. Founder, director, author and investor, based mostly in Paris and London, with regular tours in Australia.

Welcome to the site that brings together my writing on the subjects I care about: innovation, trends, management, leadership and business models.

My work sits where leadership meets innovation, helping companies and their leaders make sense of constant change and build something useful from it. Everything you will find here comes straight from that practice: the frameworks, the questions and the provocations I use with teams to rethink how they work, decide and grow.

From France to Australia

After a rich cross-cultural experience as attraction manager at Disneyland Paris, and after founding several companies specialising in HR consulting, quality of working life and employee retention, I left Paris to settle in Sydney.

I helped launch the first job site dedicated to customer service roles in Australia. It quickly grew in popularity to become the country’s fourth-largest job board by volume of listings.

The startup years in the Pacific

I bounced back by launching an integrated recruitment offering that covered attraction, employer branding, hiring and the onboarding of new starters. To this I added a « Talent Management » offering, sold under the name InsideHR, the first of its kind in the world.

My involvement in several startups inspired me to bring to the Asia-Pacific market a suite of tools designed to improve employee engagement.

As the business diversified and grew, I discovered how much I enjoyed helping young founders and speaking at conferences around the world (Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, the UK, the USA and more), sharing my experience as an international leader on management, innovation and transformation.

I then decided to leave and set off on my own « Walkabout », an Aboriginal rite of discovery, reflection and personal growth, to work out what my next career move would be.

From Human Resources to innovation and leadership

A new adventure began when I joined the Technoraid racing team, specialists in rally-raid preparation and maintenance.

After reorganising along startup lines, the team set about designing and building a competition vehicle: the Renovatio.

In just six months, we went from the first sketch to the vehicle’s first race, a vehicle we saw as revolutionary in both its build and its commercial model (apps instead of options, updates instead of servicing, and so on).

This bold prototype quickly caught the eye of several car manufacturers, which opened the door to a number of partnerships and led me to work with their marketing and strategy teams on trends and innovation (Toyota, PSA, Renault and others).

Expertise across innovation and leadership

Since then, my boundless energy and passion for innovation have led me to broaden my activities considerably.

I regularly publish articles, podcasts and videos on work culture, leadership, design and managerial innovation, both here and on my main site, Glukoze.com. This keeps me in fruitful conversation with leaders, managers and innovators from companies of every size, in France and internationally.

Side quests

I also took on the role of curator of Creative-Day, an annual event dedicated to creativity and innovation in company culture.

Alongside this, I have invested in SEM Séenergie, which handles the development, construction and operation of the Mont Saint-Michel eco-park, and in SEES, an NGO that promotes education in Cape Town, South Africa. I am also president of the Tacot des lacs, an association dedicated to preserving industrial heritage.

With innovation at the heart of what I do, I invest from time to time in inventive projects, promising business models and high-potential teams.