Thomas Åstebro

Thomas Åstebro is the Executive Director and Professor at the ION Management Science Lab at HEC Paris, and Scientific Director and Founder of the Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) in Paris. 

Leading the ION Lab, he directs a group of researchers on the selection and training of talent, with a focus on AI augmentation of these human processes. 

Professor Åstebro’s research focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. He recently concluded a randomized controlled trial (RCT) at scale in Ecuador, where over 30,000 high school students were exposed to various online training initiatives. He is now scaling up an RCT with France Travail, seeking to train the unemployed using new online and AI tools to get them employed or become entrepreneurs. 

With Associate Professor Carlos Serrano, the CDL and the HEC Incubateur, he is also exploring how to better identify and select ventures, as well as how to augment the training and mentoring of founders using new AI tools. 

He has held various high-level administrative positions at HEC and the University of Waterloo, has had substantial journal editing responsibilities, and has been an entrepreneur four times.  

In the field of pedagogy, he teaches Entrepreneurship to the MBA students. His courses are directly connected to the acceleration of deeptech ventures in the CDL. The MBA students consult venture founders on how to scale their businesses from laboratories to hire their first employees, obtain their first customers, find product-market fit, develop their business strategy, and obtain equity financing to massively scale them. The founders are mentored by a group of seasoned venture operators from whom both founders and students learn.

He is listed in Marquis Who's Who in the World, is among the top 2 percent most downloaded authors on www.ssrn, has made over 300 presentations, published over 40 academic journal articles, and has been mentioned in business media over 50 times (including The Economist, Business Week, The Times, and Wall Street Journal). 

He has previously held positions at the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and KU Leuven. He earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and holds both a Master of Engineering and a Licentiate of Technology from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.