Saadia Rashid, director, incubation and external innovation at Technip Energies, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
Saadia Rashid describes herself as being all about “looking at the big picture”. Her role at Technip Energies, the French energy sector engineering and technology company, involves “scouting, building relationships, fostering innovation, ensuring that knowledge transfer comes to our senior leadership, as well as our technology and business leadership, and making those connections so that we bring the right opportunities to them”.
Rashid leverages her engineering degree and technical background in her present role, looking at innovation and startup collaboration through a variety of tools, from investment to commercial partnerships and building startups in-house.
One of the initiatives in which Rashid has played a pivotal role is textile recycling. In 2023, Technip Energies, in partnership with IBM and Under Armour, co-created Reju, a startup developing new ways to use the vast amount of polyester fibre in textiles that goes unrecycled and ends up as waste.
“When the stakeholders finally see the merit of it, and it could take a couple of years, it really brings a lot of satisfaction”
“Understanding the different players, how that ecosystem works, what Technip can have a play in, all of it is something that I was involved in during the initial stages, which is really exciting. It gives me less guilt when I wear polyester,” she says.
The highlights and challenges of the role go hand-in-hand for Rashid. She emphasises the importance of stakeholder buy in from the organisation and the general understanding that there is a lot of risk involved.
“Getting your stakeholders to understand that there is a new way of doing things, getting them to say this is not just going to fail right off the bat is one of the hardest things,” she says. “You have to keep reiterating – yes, this company was not doing so well, but they have now made this increment and improved that much. Being resilient is important, because when the stakeholders finally see the merit of it, and it could take a couple of years, it really brings a lot of satisfaction.”
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
