Creative Destruction Lab

Established by Professor Ajay Agrawal at the Rotman School of Management in 2012 and now at 16 locations worldwide that run more than 24 different streams, the Creative Destruction Lab is a seed-stage program with a proven track record for vaulting science- and technology-based startups to commercial success. 

To date, CDL has helped create an equity value of over CAD 51bn in companies worldwide with the first IPO in 2025. HEC Paris was the eighth university worldwide to become a CDL site. Overall, more than 7,500 founders in 2,900-plus ventures have participated in the global CDL network. 

CDL trains HEC Paris MBA students to be effective business consultants in any field. Participants work directly with one of the companies in CDL-Paris, helping ventures develop financial models, evaluate potential beachhead markets, and fine-tune their strategies for scaling up their businesses.

The program at HEC Paris is competitive, so students must apply to be considered since seats are limited. During the 10-month program, which may include participation in initial venture selection, students gain first-hand experiences in all aspects of scaling a DeepTech company, with clear and concrete learning outcomes.

You will:

•    Develop your consulting skills
•    Learn how to evaluate early-stage science- and technology-based ventures
•    Learn how to prioritize goals for CEOs
•    Learn best practices directly from seasoned business operators
•    Learn how to tackle grand challenges in various fields and spot opportunities for the application of new technologies to do so.

To earn the CDL Certificate, the HEC Paris experience begins in July and August with a general asynchronous introductory course. This is followed by advanced courses – some delivered across streams and others stream-specific – designed to deepen your understanding of entrepreneurship. 

Building on this, super-advanced, stream-specific modules run through April of the following year (with the option to complete the program by December). Most of your time, however, is devoted to working as a consultant for one of the CDL-Paris ventures, helping them commercialize their science for the benefit of humankind: the core mission of CDL. 

You will engage closely with early-stage startups, CDL mentors, and potential investors. Regular in-person sessions bring these stakeholders together to assess the viability of each venture. As a result, MBAs must be highly professional, proactive, and motivated to thrive in this environment. 

In particular, you are expected to show initiative, making yourself useful and needed by the venture, and to apply both your prior professional experience and, importantly, the knowledge gained during the MBA in a hands-on, value-adding way.

If you build this level of trust with a venture, you will move beyond a purely observational role and become a true collaborator: working closely with the team, following their progress throughout the program, engaging with CDL mentors as they pass on their business judgment, and developing a deep understanding of the venture’s trajectory and key inflection points.

About the Creative Destruction Lab-Paris Streams

Founded in 2020 in partnership with HEC Paris, CDL-Paris is a philanthropically funded program run by the DeepTech Center of the HEC Paris Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute. 

Today, it hosts five streams, or verticals of focus. These streams are continuously developed in collaboration with partners, with new streams regularly explored and each stream’s thesis revisited and refined annually to remain at the forefront of scientific and technological developments.

The CDL-Paris Climate stream supports ventures developing solutions to preserve and protect the natural world, spanning areas such as mobility and infrastructure, food systems, sustainable materials, buildings and cities, the energy transition, carbon reduction and removal, risk management, circular economy models, and resource optimization.

The CDL-Paris Space stream, run jointly with CDL-Toronto, CDL-Texas, and CDL-Milan, supports founders pursuing commercial space opportunities, addressing the inherent challenges of accessing and utilizing space sustainably, with a focus on ensuring the long-term viability of space activities.

The AI & Machine Learning stream is designed for founders developing industrial applications that leverage advances in structuring information, predicting patterns, and solving complex problems, with a focus on areas such as AI agents, multimodal AI, generative AI, and enabling AI technologies.

The Next Generation Computing stream, delivered in collaboration with CDL-Berlin, and partners including the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Campus Founders, focuses on founders exploring new computing concepts, hardware, and algorithms to unlock the next frontier of computational power while reducing energy consumption. These technologies aim to tackle problems beyond the reach of classical computing such as drug discovery, material design, and large-scale optimization, while dramatically improving speed, efficiency, and scalability.

The BioTech stream supports early-stage ventures at the intersection of biology and technology, focusing on therapeutics, AI-enabled discovery, and enabling manufacturing systems, with the goal of translating scientific insight into scalable healthcare and life sciences innovations.

Every year, up to 40 highly scalable startups are admitted per stream, each supported by two (or one) HEC Paris MBA student consultants. Using an objectives-based approach, CDL mentors help companies cut through distractions and focus on achieving their most critical short-term milestones. 

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