14.10.2025
Amid profound economic, environmental, technological, and social shifts, ESSEC has made a clear choice: to place entrepreneurship and innovation at the heart of its strategy, empowering leaders to invent new models, drive transitions, and turn uncertainty into a catalyst for positive impact.
At ESSEC Business School, entrepreneurship is not just another specialization. It is a backbone, a pedagogical and strategic foundation.
“The major economic, environmental, and technological challenges continue to evolve in an accelerating world.
Only entrepreneurial leaders will be truly prepared to face these challenges and move forward in an uncertain environment, exploring markets in new ways, harnessing new technologies, and shaping new business models.
Being part of this movement means reinventing ourselves, changing both the way we see the world and the way we work. It is this strong expectation from businesses, our students, participants, and alumni that ESSEC is determined to meet with strength and conviction.
Our ambition is bold. Each year, we support more than 600 entrepreneurs and nurture entrepreneurial thinking in over 12,500 students—helping turn economic, environmental, and social challenges into opportunities to create systemic, positive impact.
Because we are convinced that entrepreneurs will be the conductors of a responsible and committed society, ESSEC stands firmly beside them, ready to champion this mission.”
Vincenzo Vinzi, Dean and President of ESSEC Business School
In this spirit, ESSEC approaches entrepreneurship as a hands-on education in complexity: a tangible response to the defining challenges of our time: ecological transition, the rise of AI, geopolitical change, and accelerating technological innovation. A complete and coherent ecosystem is now in place, enabling anyone to engage, regardless of age, background, or project type.
Driven by the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, ESSEC has built a comprehensive entrepreneurial ecosystem structured around four missions:
Each year, ESSEC supports more than 600 entrepreneurs, while every student benefits from a strong entrepreneurial culture through programs, events, incubators, and workshops.
Through ESSEC Ventures, the school’s student incubator, over 200 projects are supported annually. Since 2023, a further 40 alumni-led ventures have been hosted at Station F. “We’re a factory for entrepreneurs, for industry leaders, and for SME founders,” explains Nicolas Landrin, Director of ESSEC’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
The school pursues three main entrepreneurial paths:
The entrepreneurial mindset is cultivated at every stage of life, whether at the start of a career or after decades of professional experience, across all programs and campuses. ESSEC encourages project leaders to experiment, to create, to fail often in order to progress, and to keep learning. “When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re a salesperson, a marketer, an accountant, a manager… all in the same day. You practice hard skills and soft skills alike,” notes Nicolas Landrin.
Entrepreneurial learning at ESSEC is rooted in reality, in confronting complexity and uncertainty. “We are living through two unprecedented and simultaneous revolutions in human history: AI and the environmental transition. We must reinvent ourselves, develop a global vision, and know how to speak, act, and mobilize,” he adds.
The development of ESSEC’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is a core element of its Transcend strategy, which aims to train inclusive, influential, and multicultural leaders capable of rising above themselves to build a prosperous and resilient world. This ambition resonates closely with European priorities: inclusive, green, and technology-driven transitions.
Through its campuses in France, Morocco, and Singapore, ESSEC grounds its entrepreneurial action in local ecosystems, forging strong partnerships to meet a critical need: fostering a new generation of leaders capable of building a desirable future.
