The business case “Preparing future leaders at Ateme” by Valérie Gauthier, Associate Professor of Languages and Cultures at HEC Paris, has been published on The Case Centre. Based on the Professor’s experience and expertise in relational leadership built over 30 years of research and practice, the case explores how and why a growing tech company prepares today’s talents to face tomorrow’s leadership challenges.
The case on Camif by Margot Bréard, HEC Paris graduate, in collaboration with Bénédicte Faivre-Tavignot and Laurence Lehmann-Ortega, Education Track Professors of Strategy and Business Policy at HEC Paris, has been published by the Case Centre platform. It investigates the process of defining a company’s overarching ‘purpose’, it emphasizes the link between purpose and corporate culture and shows the transformative power a strong purpose statement has for the organization and how its strategy is deployed.
“Montrennoble: Flourishing sustainable city in France” case, written by HEC Paris Professor Bertrand V. Quélin, Bouygues Chair Professor in Smart City and the Common Good and HEC graduate Isaure Fraissinet, has just been released on the Case Centre platform. The case's objective is to help participants analyze the needs of a sustainable and smart city in an encompassing manner, meeting the city’s energy and mobility needs today as well as anticipating the future.
Schneider Electric (SE) is a world leader in energy management. Corporate Knights ranked it the world’s most sustainable company in 2021. Knowledge@HEC met with Gilles Vermot Desroches, Director of Corporate Citizenship and Institutional Relations since 2020. A trained engineer, he has been designing Schneider’s sustainability for the last 25 years. He discusses the company’s understanding of ESG, its strategic efforts to develop its performance, and how to measure their impact.
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.
