Julien LEVY

Affiliate Professor - Director of the Digital Centre at HEC - Head of the Chair AXA Digital strategy and big data. 

Julien Lévy has completed extensive studies in philosophy and political sociology (Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Paris), is a graduate of Science-Po and HEC, and earned a PhD in management from HEC. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration in Dartmouth and a Visiting Researcher at the University of California in Berkeley.

In 1998 he became a Professor (previously Affiliate Professor) at HEC and started the first electronic marketing course in France, together with Jacques Lendrevie.

In 2002 he was made Director of the 3^rd year specialization in e-business, the "Management and New Technologies" Major coordinated in partnership with Télécom ParisTech, that became the Major Digital in 2015.

In 2011 he helped create and was appointed head of the E-business Chair in "Digital Innovation for Business", sponsored by five Internet entrepreneurs: Jacques-Antoine Granjon (founder and CEO of vente-privee.com), Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet (founder and CEO of PriceMinister), Xavier Niel (founder of Free and Vice Chairman of the Board), Steve Rosenblum (founder and CEO of PIXmania.com) and Marc Simoncini (Meetic founder and CEO).

In this capacity, he established and has since run the "Digital Innovation for Business" Certificate, an English language program for graduates from HEC, dealing with e-business and start-ups.

In 2014 he helped create and became head of the AXA Digital Strategy and Big Data Chair. In this role he set up and co-directed the "Digital Transformation" Certificate, focusing on the challenges of e-business in large corporations.

In 2015, he is appointed Directeor of the newly created Digital Center at HEC, the task of which is to coordinate chairs and programs in e-business: elective courses, Académies, Major, Certificates.

He has also coordinated marketing courses for the Executive MBA and has started various Academies (programs for first and second year students) covering e-business.

His educational initiatives focus on learning by doing: the classwork is reduced and redesigned, and more emphasis is placed on “mentored challenges” during which participants learn by doing (e.g. using a brief, they design an online advertisement and create a functional transactional website in three weeks). This approach has been tested and developed over several years and shares commonalities with design thinking methods.

Julien Lévy is a consultant in marketing strategy and digital strategy and his current research focuses on digital transformation and design thinking.

With Jacques Lendrevie he is co-author of Mercator, the bestselling French language marketing manual. Each year he edits and writes Netexplo Trends Report, the study on digital innovations.