Florent Laroche is a "doctor-engineer" working as an assistant professor at Ecole Centrale de Nantes (France) and as a researcher in the laboratory IRCCyN (Research Institute for Communication and Cybernetics of Nantes, France - UMR CNRS 6597). His Ph.D. (2007) concerns the application of tools of engineering sciences to industrial heritage (http://florent.laroche.free.fr), for which he was awarded by the daily Le Monde. He is currently working on the translation of knowledge of the past in contemporary knowledge, readable and understandable in the present socio-technical system. One objective of this research is to reuse the technical heritage as a basis for innovation. His research topics are KM, PLM, information system modeling, interoperability, enterprise modeling, virtual engineering, reverse engineering.