The last world cohort of Edhec MBA. The French business school has launched a new center for net positive companies to promote companies that give more to society and the environment than they take.
Edhec Business School from France last week (April 25) launched its Center for net positive business (CNPB) at the ChangeNow summit in Paris.
The idea of the center was presented for the first time in the Strategic Plan of the 2024-2028 school Generations 2050 Unveiled last summer. As part of this plan, the school has engaged 21 million euros over four years to give life to the center, mixing research, reflection strategies and real world projects in class.
Its objective is simple but ambitious: to help companies give more to society and to the environment than they take.
“Faced with the acceleration of environmental, economic and social crises, approaches focused on the minimization of damage are insufficient,” explains Dean Emmanuel Métais. “While remaining profitable, companies must actively contribute to the regeneration of their environment.”
René Rohrbeck, director of the Center for Net Positive Business, speaks when the center is launched at the Summit The ChangeNow in Paris.
The center is led by Professor René Rohrbeck – the director president of provident, innovation and transformation in Edhec – and is supposed to be a space where ideas are transformed into real solutions. Students will be at the heart of this process.
Teaching what it means to be positive net
The idea of being “positive” comes from Paul Polman and Andrew Winston, authors of a positive net: how courageous businesses thrive by giving more than they take it. Instead of simply doing less harm, net positive companies go further, helping to restore the environment, support social equity and create a value that benefits shareholders, but also to employees, customers and communities.
In 2023, Thinkers50 Classified co-authors n ° 3 on their biannual price list, considered the Oscars of the most revolutionary management ideas.
The new EDHEC center translates these ideas into curriculum, tangible case tools and case studies. Students will not only learn from faculty research but examples of the real world. The Center Future Fitness Index already includes more than 50 case studies with companies working to integrate sustainability into their basic strategies. It also offers a self-assessment tool to help companies assess their impact and trajectory, resources that will be shared in Edhec courses.
Change mentalities
The Center is based on the work that is already occurring at Edhec thanks to its pension, innovation and transformation chair (FIT), which helps companies think in advance and plan back since the future to meet large -scale challenges. Now, this research moves to specific industries such as construction and nutrition through what the center calls “lasting ways”.
Instead of using a unique approach, the center will adjust its tools to adapt to the unique problems in each sector. Students will be practical with these tools and will learn how to connect long -term objectives with the decisions that companies make today.
The objective is to help companies make better decisions by showing how their actions work now and what type of impact they will decrease, by ensuring that short -term movements support long -term objectives, the school said.
Although things like supply chains and technical problems can slow down companies, Edhec leaders say that the real challenge is to change the way people think. “There is another slowdown factor that must be taken into account: organizational inertia or even resistance,” said the school.
Passing on a net positive company is not a question of tools, it is a question of changing mentalities and developing the right skills to ensure that these ideas start from daily decisions and leadership.
To help this, the center will run new courses to teach students how to think in the long term, understand systems and manage change. These courses will be part of the existing Edhec programs for students and professionals.
Startup pipeline
The Center also plans to team up with the Center for Entrepreneurship Responsible for Edhec (CRE), which leads all the school entrepreneurship efforts. Together, they want to help students and founders create positive positive companies from the start.
They launch two main programs:
- The net positive factory: It is a startup track that starts with training camps focused on the idea and leads to an incubation program at Station F, the largest start -up campus in the world. He will act as a real -time laboratory to study and share how sharp positive startups come to life.
- The impact track: This brings together students, researchers, businesses and public institutions to meet major challenges in specific sectors and find innovative solutions together.
“We must teach our students that, although the objective of a company is to create profits, it must also have a positive impact on the world. This is something that we firmly believe, something that the young generation is disturbed deeply, and something that companies realize now that they must answer,” said Métais P&Q in an interview last fall.
“This is what we call the capitalism of stakeholders. We must teach our students that the main objective of a company is not only to serve its shareholders, but to serve all its stakeholders in general. ”
Don't miss: MBA World of Edhec: where sustainability meets entrepreneurship And P & Q interview: Edhec Dean Emmanuel Métais on “net-post” affairs
