Who Invents the Future of Watchmaking? Innovation, Tradition & Power | Carole Forestier-Kasapi

Who decides what the mechanical watch becomes next?

Collectors can determine what becomes desirable. Brands can shape narratives. Markets can assign value. But beneath all of them lies another form of power: the ability to change the mechanism itself.

Carole Forestier-Kasapi is one of the defining technical minds of contemporary watchmaking. Across a career spanning Renaud & Papi, Ulysse Nardin, Cartier, ValFleurier, and TAG Heuer, she has worked at the intersection of invention, movement development, industrial strategy, and haute horlogerie.

In this episode of Watches & Politics, we explore the politics of innovation.

What makes an invention meaningful rather than merely novel? How far can a centuries-old mechanical technology evolve before it begins to challenge its own identity? And after surviving the Quartz Crisis, what gives mechanical watchmaking legitimacy in a world of smartwatches, artificial intelligence, and instantaneous digital time?

We discuss the relationship between industrial production and haute horlogerie, the possibilities created by new materials and oscillators, and why understanding a maison's history can be essential before attempting to reinvent its future.

But there is a larger question underneath the technology.

Tradition is often understood as preservation. Yet watchmaking itself was built through centuries of experimentation, competition, and technical disruption. Perhaps preserving that tradition therefore requires something more difficult than protecting the past.

Perhaps it requires continuing to invent.

This is a conversation about technology as power: who has the authority to change an established system, what makes that change legitimate, and why the future of mechanical watchmaking may depend upon its willingness to evolve.