Entrepreneurship and Startups

Entrepreneurship and Startups

April 26th, 2024

Impact Investing: How HEC Alumni Karen Degouve Engages in the Transition

In this interview, Karen Degouve (H.94) explains her pivotal role in coordinating sustainable finance efforts within French banking groups, which face challenges in developing profitable yet planet-conscious businesses. Degouve offers valuable guidance for graduates entering the business world and investors seeking to align their financial decisions with sustainability goals. She also took the time to share her opinion on research findings on ESG and impact investment conducted by the HEC Paris faculty.

Entrepreneurship and Startups

April 24th, 2024

Coffee Roasted at Origin: How HEC Alumni Quentin Rouyer Engages in the Transition

We interviewed Quentin Rouyer, the Founder and CEO of Alternative Café, a trailblazing fair-trade coffee importer and distributor. Through its unique model of importing directly from producers and advocating for in-country roasting, Alternative Café is revolutionizing the coffee industry's approach to sustainability. From its renowned World Coffee Challenge to its commitment to empowering growers, Alternative Café's innovative practices are reshaping the coffee sector while promoting social and environmental responsibility.

Entrepreneurship and Startups

April 18th, 2024

Two HEC Startups Use Plants and Satellites to Drive Sustainability

We interviewed the founders of two startups in HEC’s incubator at Station F that have come up with green innovations making a deep impact in their respective sectors. Genomines utilizes plants to selectively extract targeted metals, crucial for battery production, aiming to minimize environmental impact. Pixstart offers tailored satellite imagery analysis to monitor changes in water, forests, agricultural fields, and construction sites, optimizing environmental resource management and informing decisions.

Entrepreneurship and Startups

March 08th, 2024

5 minutes

AI Can Level Global Playing Field

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing all fields of business, forcing academics and practitioners to revise their fundamentals. To discuss these new challenges, HEC Associate Professor Carlos Serrano and his colleague Thomas Åstebro organized a groundbreaking workshop inviting some of the world’s top researchers to compare their approach to those of leading industrialists. In our latest Breakthroughs, we discuss some of the takeaways with Serrano, an academic in the school’s Department of Economics and Decision Sciences.

Associate Professor

Entrepreneurship and Economics

Entrepreneurship and Startups

November 27th, 2023

Startups Founded by Ph.D.s Decline: Why One Should Worry

After obtaining their diploma, graduates with a Ph.D. can choose between becoming academics, joining a large company, or founding or joining a start-up. The fraction of Ph.D.s in science and engineering who have started or joined a new firm has declined by approximately 38% in the U.S. since 1997. Entrepreneurship and Innovation Professor Thomas Astebro of HEC Paris, explains this phenomenon, summarizing his article published this summer in the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal with Serguey Brgauinsky and Yuheng Ding of the University of Maryland.

By Thomas Åstebro

researcher in a tech startup_vignette

Entrepreneurship and Startups

July 21st, 2023

Lean Startup: Why Do So Many New Startups Follow the Same Development Philosophy?

When we think of startups, we think of fresh, ideas-led businesses that seek to break the mold in how they do things or in what they produce. But when it comes to their business practices and values, it seems that, rather than being pioneers of innovation, many startups adhere to very similar ways of doing things: following the Lean Startup philosophy. A recent study from researchers in management accounting and control Sebastian D. Becker of HEC Paris and Christoph Endenich of ESSEC Business School shows why this is the case.

By Sebastian Becker

station F HEC - vignette

Entrepreneurship and Startups

July 20th, 2023

Creative Destruction Lab Tackles AI and Geopolitics in Historic Super Session

Around 1,200 participants congregated in Toronto for the first in-person CDL Super Session in four years. The two-day event featured intense exchanges between startups from the 24 CDL streams, mentors, researchers and academics. There were equally hard-hitting exchanges on AI, geopolitical shifts in innovation and the advancement of humanlike intelligence. HEC Paris sent a strong delegation to Canada to exchange on its growing involvement in this objective-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage companies.

Entrepreneurship and Startups

April 21st, 2023

Why Venture Capitalists Should Invest in Start-Ups Led by Diverse Teams

How do diverse European teams fare in gathering investment for their ideas and taking their product or service to market? Amazingly, this question had remained unanswered until now. A study from two HEC researchers and a UK-based venture capitalist marks the first time that gender and ethnic diversity data was gathered on European start-ups attracting venture capital… with some surprising results.

By Carlos Serrano , Thomas Åstebro

diverse team working in a meeting room - thumbnail

Entrepreneurship and Startups

February 06th, 2023

How to Ensure Entrepreneur Training Really Delivers Business Growth

Vast sums have been pumped into training schemes to boost entrepreneurship and innovation despite mixed reviews of their true impact. As belts tighten in a struggling world economy and further justification is needed, attention returns to this vital question: Do ambitious entrepreneurs benefit more from training? A new study by Anne-Valérie Corboz of HEC Paris, Reddi Kotha and Yimin Lin of the Singapore Management University, and Balagopal Vissa of INSEAD, reveals under which conditions training has a beneficial impact.

By Anne-Valérie Corboz

people brainstorming in an office-knowledge-thumbnail

Entrepreneurship and Startups

November 02nd, 2022

How AI is Affecting VC Funding of Innovative Startups

Artificial Intelligence adoption by investors might hinder the allocation of capital to breakthrough innovations. Learn more in this interview with Maxime Bonelli, PhD student in Finance at HEC Paris, on his dissertation. Maxime focuses on the real effects of new technologies and human capital in the financial sector, to help us better understand how the industrial organization of the financial sector affects the real economy.