Michel SAFARS

Michel Safars has been teaching Entrepreneurship at HEC Paris since 2002. He also chairs the HEC Paris MBA Entrepreneurship specialization and founded the HEC Paris Entrepreneurship Lab (eLab). Michel is actively involved in Executive Education programs, most notably as the Academic Director of the BPI Excellence Seminars that have been entrusted to HEC Paris by the BPI - Banque Publique d’Investissements (French Public Investment Bank).

Michel is a board-member of Thasos Group, a MIT spin-off specialized on big data, the startup is now based in New York.

He was recently the co-founder & Director of the Lagardère Lab, which was created with the aim of developing innovation within the Lagardère Group.

In 1989 Michel founded his first company, Mipsys, which he ran until it was sold in 1997. He then became the founder and CEO of KeeBoo, a San Francisco based startup developing digital catalogs. After that he took on successive roles as COO of INRIA-Transfert, a subsidiary of INRIA (French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation) and Founding Partner of IT-Translation, an investment fund for public sector IT research startups.