HEC Teaching Awards Go to Professors Combining Passion, Play, and Pedagogy

This year’s Vernimmen Awards, celebrated two professors who make the most challenging subjects, finance and leadership, come alive for their students. 

Key Findings

• Finance professor Bruno Biais and leadership expert Emmanuel Coblence were jointly awarded, a rare pairing that underscored the diversity of HEC’s teaching excellence.
• Teaching as Performance and Craft: Both winners treat teaching as a creative process, Biais through games and experimental economics, Coblence through leadership “craftmanship.”
• The Human Factor: The jury emphasized the irreplaceable presence of engaged teachers at a time when online learning and AI challenge traditional education.
• Evolving Pedagogy: Teaching today requires blending methods that speak to different learning styles, not just the old cours magistral.
• A Distinctive Prize: Unlike many peer-school awards, the Vernimmen recognizes not only classroom performance but research-informed teaching, mentorship, and pedagogical innovation.
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Going Beyond Competence and Flair

On an early fall evening in central Paris, the BivwAk! innovation space of BNP Paribas hosted an event that has become a quiet ritual in the French business-school calendar: the annual Prix Vernimmen. Since 1998, this prize has rewarded not research or publications, but something at once humbler and more radical - the art of teaching itself. 

Around sixty faculty members, alumni, and friends of HEC gathered under the high ceilings of the Rue Rossini venue. The first to speak was Sophie Javary, vice-chairperson of BNP Paribas CIB EMEA and president of the Vernimmen jury, who has now presided over the prize for four years. Javary reminded the audience that the jury’s task is never an easy one: “What stood out this year was the quality of all the candidates. Every year, the choice becomes more difficult - and this year we decided to reward two professors whose fields are, at least on paper, among the driest: finance and leadership. That’s what makes this 2025 vintage so fascinating.”

In an era when the very relevance of classroom teaching is questioned, Javary’s words had a subtext: why sit through lectures when everything is a click away? What she was celebrating was not merely competence but the ability to keep live teaching alive. “When everybody thinks that you can learn online and by watching videos,” she said, “they should know there is nothing that replaces the physical presence of an engaged teacher.”

Role Playing in Finance Classes

The first laureate was Bruno Biais, one of Europe’s most cited finance scholars. A scholar who could have stayed safely in the rarefied air of top journals but instead chose to stand in front of students year after year since 1990. His acceptance speech was both touching and theatrical. He opened by thanking his teachers, beginning with Pierre Vernimmen himself, the legendary figure whose name the prize bears. “He stepped into the classroom with his golden watch out, in his three-piece suit, and told students about impressive deals .”

But it was the 2018 winner of the prize, Denis Gromb (who passed away tragically two years ago), who left the deepest mark on him. “Denis mirrored a deep humanity in everything he did. He was so close to all the people he interacted with at HEC, irrespective of their background or status.” The room was momentarily hushed. Biais then turned to his students: “They are so bright, both very conceptual and down-to-earth. It’s a privilege to teach them.”

Biais is no ordinary lecturer. His classes often feel like theatre - or perhaps more accurately, like a game of life. “Teaching is about playing a game,” he told me after receiving the award. “In my courses, that’s what we do. I design games and we play them together. Then I show them the equations from finance theory, and we discuss how the math relates to what they just experienced.” This is not the austere finance pedagogy of stereotype, the chalk-dusted professor scribbling Greek letters on a blackboard (although Bruno does use quite a bit of Greek letters). The equations are still there, but students reach them through play, a Socratic detour that disarms their fear and turns finance into something tangible.

In this sense, Biais belongs to a small but growing tradition of professors who blend research and pedagogy into a seamless practice. He draws from experimental economics, using classroom simulations to test how actual human behavior compares to the predictions of theory. “It’s a lot of fun,” he said, smiling, as if to remind his audience that play is not the opposite of rigor, but its companion.

Teaching as Craft

If Biais embodies finance’s cerebral and playful side, Emmanuel Coblence represents something more intimate: leadership as a form of craftwork. Coblence, who has been part of the HEC world since graduating in 2005 and teaching for nearly two decades, has a method that is resolutely participant-centered. “The raw material of my curriculum,” he explained, “is not so much theories or tools, but the actual situations my participants bring to class.”

Leadership, for Coblence, is not a doctrine to be transmitted but a personal signature to be shaped. “I like to think of leadership teaching as craftmanship,” he said, lingering over the word. “You need to craft the curriculum, craft the behaviors of the leaders attending, craft the business situations they face and make sure that personal development corresponds to organizational development.”

That craftsmanship requires flexibility, especially in a world shaken by AI and automation. The Associate Professor (Education Track) in his mid-40s is working alongside his colleague Julien Jourdan and Catherine Tanneau on the question of what happens to leadership when much of management becomes automated. “If management can be done by AI, then leadership becomes even more important. We need to prepare the next generation of leaders to provide meaning to teams whose jobs may be transformed by technology.”

When he took the microphone, Coblence appeared both proud and slightly overwhelmed. He thanked three professors who had shaped his own path: Jean Nioche, who opened his eyes to research; Michel Fiol, a master pedagogue who mentored him as a young instructor; and Andrea Masini, who trusted him early on with major teaching responsibilities. “This prize,” he said, “is a collective one, to the entire leadership faculty, who are so close, so cooperative, so full of solidarity.”

The Jury’s Perspective

Presiding over this process is no small task. Andrea Masini, Dean of Faculty and Research, has been on the Vernimmen jury for nine years, in various roles, and sees the award as a measure of how teaching has evolved. The process is rigorous: out of 170 faculty, a shortlist is drawn up based on student evaluations, then narrowed to a half-dozen names proposed by Associate Deans and program directors, that the jury debates at length. “The discussion is fascinating,” Masini said. “It allows us to go beyond student evaluations, to understand that extra contribution that person contributes to pedagogical excellence. It can , be a new method, the integration of new insights from the professor’s research, or new perspective on companies and the corporate world. You’re looking for colleagues who put their heart into the job.”

The very criteria for winning have shifted. “A few years ago,” Masini reflected, “it was enough to be a star teacher, a charismatic speaker delivering extremely well structured lectures , and an ability to engage with students. Today, being a star teacher necessary but there has to be more. You must innovate and blend methods, because each participant learns differently. You must have something for the visual learner, the hands-on learner, those who need dialogue. But one thing has not changed: passion. Without passion, you cannot be a great teacher.”

Masini also gestured toward what might be called the “HEC way,” though he was quick to resist a single definition. “It’s rigor, relevance, passion, - and cosmopolitanism,” he said. “Our faculty reflect 170 personalities and nationalities. There isn’t one HEC way, but many ways.”

Why This Award Matters

Prizes for teaching are hardly unique to HEC Paris. INSEAD, London Business School, and Wharton all have their own versions, typically tied to student evaluations. But the Vernimmen Prize stands out for its balance between quantitative data and qualitative judgment, its jury deliberations, and its attention to the whole contribution of a professor -research-informed teaching, mentorship, even entrepreneurship.

It is, in its quiet way, a statement about the future of business education. At a time when MOOCs and AI tutors promise scale and efficiency, the Vernimmen this year celebrated the human, the personal, and the playful. It rewarded professors who are not just knowledgeable, but present, making finance fun, crafting leadership one student at a time.

This year’s winners, Bruno Biais and Emmanuel Coblence are not celebrities, and they did not use the award to promote themselves. They spoke of their teachers, their students, their colleagues, the collective work of making learning matter. And perhaps that is the real lesson of the Vernimmen Awards: that in the end, teaching is not about the teacher, but about what happens in the room when ideas meet people. “And something beautiful happens,” remarked one of their colleagues after the ceremony. In short, the evening’s conversations revealed a renewed vision of teaching as a blend of rigor, playfulness, and deep human connection.