If you asked Fabio Crescenti five years ago if he believed he’d one day be helping a food tech company engineer solutions to make vertical farming possible and scalable, he might have laughed.
That’s because Crescenti’s background and PhD are in aerospace engineering.
After more than a decade of post-graduate studies, he found himself working as an Industry Process Consultant in Dassault Systèmes’ Business Development Hub. In his role, he helps match businesses with tailored solutions from our suite of technologies, identifying exactly what products will help them get the results they want.
But Crescenti’s work goes beyond his job description. He’s part of a cohort of mentors who volunteer their time and expertise to assist start-ups in the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab Accelerator program.
His introduction to the lab was almost by happenstance. One of the managers of the flagship lab in Paris happened to visit Cresencti’s office in Barcelona. But at the time, mentoring wasn’t meant to be for him.
“I discovered the lab in my first year (at the company), but I took some time to think about joining as a mentor, because I was still getting used to Dassault Systèmes in general,” he said.
But once he’d adjusted, he was ready to start mentoring and decided to ask about getting involved.
Piping up led to a meeting and, eventually, the opportunity to mentor a start-up. It took eight months until he was matched with one that needed his skills, but finally, the day came.
Now, he’s sharing his expertise with French food tech start-up Futura Gaia. They’re working on creating scalable vertical farms, promoting an agricultural future in which the same amount of produce that would ordinarily grow in a greenhouse could flourish anywhere, even in a tiny corner of an urban area. To do so, they needed Cresenti’s knowledge of computational fluid dynamics. He’s been working with one of their engineers to help him simulate the humidity and heat controls in the company’s modular vertical farms. Given how important these two aspects of farming are, being able to lean on an expert like Crescenti has been advantageous.
Futura Gaia, like other start-ups in the accelerator program, gets access not only to Dassault Systèmes solutions, like the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and SOLIDWORKS, but to the company’s mentors, too. Dozens of employees volunteer their time each year to provide support to early-stage companies with ambitions to change the world.
Crescenti’s first venture into mentoring was years ago, as a teaching assistant during his studies. Now, in addition to helping Futura Gaia, he also mentors his unit’s interns, who join the team for six months at a time. The experience has been transformative.
“For sure, it’s taught me a lot,” he explained. “When it comes to explaining things to others, you realize, first of all, maybe you’re convinced you know enough, but then you might find it’s not the case.”
Mentoring and teaching, he said, “helps you actually understand things better.”
Since Crescenti’s unit in the company works specifically with start-ups, his mentorship with the lab almost comes naturally. He’s familiar with the big ideas and agility that these early-stage companies are known for, but there have been some surprising things, too.
Sometimes, the start-ups he encounters “bring these crazy ideas, usually at the limit of physics.”
Bigger companies, he explained, “just ask for traditional things.” They have a problem and want a solution they know will work. But sometimes start-ups want ground-breaking innovation, and it’s Crescenti’s job to help them uncover it.
“For me, it’s very stimulating, researching, trying to investigate, looking for new things,” to solve their problems, he said. This aspect of mentoring has added a new layer of excitement to Crescenti’s work.
The experience has provided him with a new outlook on his work and a new approach he’s happy to take.
Outside of work, he enjoys basking in the Barcelona sun. After having completed his PhD in the UK, he was glad to join Dassault Systèmes in Spain, a sunny respite after years of dreary British skies.
Fabio Crescenti is part of a cohort of Dassault Systèmes employees lending their knowledge to ground-breaking start-ups. Check out how some of his other colleagues are driving progress.
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