Strategy

At present, companies understand the urgency to act in favor of the protection of the planet by reducing their carbon footprint but do not often see the business case underlying social impact. Yet businesses that fail to act on social and economic inclusion will find it harder and harder to operate. This is why it is crucial to teach new ways of building strategies to reduce inequalities and fight against poverty. Education Track, Associate Professor Bénédicte Faivre-Tavignot of HEC Paris’ Society & Organizations (S&O) Institute explains how this emerging subject is taught at all levels at HEC Paris in order to change organizational cultures from within.

Because of Europe’s strong social welfare tradition, the social dimension of business has an additional legitimacy and urgency here. Top-quality research and teaching have an essential role to play in understanding growing inequalities which hinder the urgently needed ecological transition, in interrogating the environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors, their interplay and their promise and limitations, in leveraging theory and the most ambitious empirical methods. As a leading business school and research center in France and Europe, HEC Paris’ faculty has a responsibility in providing science-based evidence and practical tools to reinvent the business of tomorrow.

Camille Putois is the CEO of Business for Inclusive Growth (B4IG), a coalition of more than 40 global businesses, representing 4.4 million employees and a combined revenue of over 1 trillion USD. She discusses how this coalition strives for more inclusive practices and navigates the pros and cons of the different methods to measure progress on this crucial topic. For this, she worked with Leandro Nardi and Marieke Huysentruyt, researchers at the Inclusive Economy Center at HEC Paris.

Bertrand Quélin is professor of Strategy and the holder of the Bouygues-HEC Paris Chair in ‘Smart City and the Common Good’. He has been spearheading research on ways public bodies and private companies partner up to create both social and economic value. We discuss how the partnerships rely on a form of hybridization relying on three mechanisms: contractual, institutional and the ability to regularly partner up with public authorities.

How can private companies and public bodies reorganize their short- and long-term strategies in the current economic context? For years, Professor Bertrand Quélin has been researching the collaboration between private firms, public authorities and civil society to offer solutions aimed at building resilience in cities and designed to tackle the challenges of climate change.

In 2022, HEC Paris in Qatar launched a dedicated Business Research Laboratory to produce in-depth case studies on businesses and organizations in the GCC region. Deval Kartik is lead case writer at HEC Paris in Qatar. She explains the importance of this new laboratory for learners, organizations and the region itself. 

The case study on Alenvi, by HEC Paris graduate Léa Veiga-Planells and Strategy Professor Laurence Lehmann-Ortega, demonstrates how managerial innovation enables a business model to be reinvented in a mature and non-digitized sector and to assess the role that business purpose can play in shaping company's strategy.

Just days after the conclusion of the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC) in Barcelona, HEC Paris Bouygues Professor Bertrand Quélin and SASI Master's graduate Isaac Smadja publish a key study of six award-winning smart cities across the globe. The 238-page eBook is the result of a partnership between Bouygues and HEC in the context of the school’s Smart City & the Common Good Chair. We exchange informally with Professor Quélin about the advantages of, and challenges to, tomorrow’s cities.

Mobilize, Renault’s affordable car project case, written by HEC Paris Professor Olivier Chatain, has just been released on the Case Centre platform. This case study explores how an automobile manufacturer creates an ecosystem to provide affordable mobility solutions for those in the suburban areas in France.