The teaching and research chairs bring ESSEC into close collaboration with companies keen to develop innovative skills in their sector. Placed under the responsibility of members of the faculty body, each Chair has an objective to produce new knowledge, develop science and management practice confronted with the new challenges of the international environment, and to create a flow of data and market analyses.
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Accenture Strategic Business Analytics Chair
Accenture and ESSEC with the Strategic Business Analytics Chair (SBA) are committed to train the next generation of data leaders. Our dynamic teaching methods, designed for the Chair, ensure a rigorous, immersive and impactful learning experience. We shape future executives to attain the right mind-set, with interpersonal and analytical skills to create business value. Finally, it’s also our priority to cultivate creativity and to build capacity to change.
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Armand Peugeot Chair
This Chair is a partnership between the University, PSA and 3 institutions for higher education and and research: Ecole Centrale de Paris, ESSEC Business School and Supélec. This partnership allows the chair to cover multidisciplinary and complementary topics and affectively address the complex questions that arise when talking about the future of the automotive industry in the context of development of electromobility and hybrid vehicles. Its structure allows the chair to convene around the fields of science, engineering, economics, management science and social science.
Chair's website (in French)
Chaire ESSEC Talents de la Transition Écologique
The Chair develops a holistic approach to environmental transition: with a pedagogy based on expert lecturers, certifications (carbon accounting), coaching, field visits and corporate research missions, it aims to grow all-around talents around ecology, ready to impact any type of organisation - from large corporations to NGOs, public entities, SMBs or startups. Tackled topics include: climate change, biodiversity, water, energy and food transition, new shapes of mobility, territory transition, waste management, digital impact, eco-psychology, environmental justice within societies and a geopolitical level, CSR and alternative models, and eventually new narratives and sustainability communication. Objectives: arm students in the face of complexity, grow systemic vision, and inspire creativity and embodiment for transition solutions. The Chair is also a research Chair, focusing on transition processes within companies and between stakeholders, in order to understand how players from the economic, public and civic worlds can influence each other in an accelerating transition process.
Chair's website (in French)
Chair for Real Estate and Sustainable Development
The Chair for Real Estate and Sustainable Development provides theoretical and practical training in current issues facing the real estate industry. It aims to support both teaching and research in the economics, financing and management of the real estate industry whilst taking into account issues of sustainable development.
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Chair in Philanthropy
The ESSEC Philanthropy Chair is a Research Chair dedicated to understanding philanthropy and enhancing its impact. Philanthropy can be defined as all forms of private funding for public purposes, especially donations from individuals, companies, and foundations. It represents a growing source of funding for nonprofit and public organizations, and its influence is on the rise in most countries around the world. The Chair is interested in new ways to fund social innovation, such as impact investing and crowdfunding. Through academic research, dissemination and training, the Chair combines academic rigor and practical relevance to produce and disseminate new knowledge on philanthropy, mainly in France and in Europe.
Chair's website (in French)
Chair of Leadership and Diversity
The Chair offers students a specialized program combining theoretical perspectives, practical knowledge acquired from professional presentations in the seminar, and hands-on experience through concrete projects with our partner firm L'Oréal. The objective of the chair program is to heighten awareness, create experiences, and gain insights on the relationships between leadership, diversity and innovation. The Leadership and Diversity Chair is grounded in the idea that understanding and harnessing diversity is essential for responsible and innovative leadership. It introduces students to current diversity and inclusion issues through seminar sessions with company representatives, and to conceptualize diversity and inclusion as not only a social responsibility, but more importantly as a source of innovation and collective intelligence. It encourages students to develop their own leadership through this knowledge, and also through group projects working with our sponsor firm, L'Oréal. In the group projects, students produce digital content that is showcased on your website, and they have the opportunity to present their work to middle and upper-level managers..
Chair's website
Chair on Digital Disruption
Recent developments in technology have had a revolutionary effect on consumers, businesses and society. The ESSEC Digital Disruption Chair is designed to provide participants with in-depth understanding of the digital effect on businesses while also preparing them to work in and manage increasingly digital organizations.
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ESSEC Amundi Chair in Asset & Risk Management
The ESSEC - Amundi Chair aims at promoting academic research in the field of Asset & Risk Management, in particular in ESG investing, and fosters cooperation between ESSEC and Amundi researchers through the organization of a series of research seminars, an annual workshop, a series of Webinars on the Chair’s theme, and a series of Research Letters on ESG issues. It also offers a framework for the joint supervision and financing of a student wishing to pursue his PhD in finance at ESSEC, working on a Chair’s research topic.
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ESSEC Beauty Chair
The ESSEC Beauty Chair is the first training for excellence in Europe dedicated to the beauty sector. This new sectorial chair aims at preparing students for an appealing career in the beauty industry and being equipped to face the new deal of the beauty world: growth of organic, sustainable brands in an agile and connected world. The chair provides students with a highly comprehensive vision of the challenges faced by the beauty industry and train them with the active participation of our partners (The Estée Lauder Company, I.F.F, and The Groupe Douglas /Nocibé) to launch innovative products and services in the context of any situation.
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ESSEC Change Management Chair
The ambition of ESSEC’s Change Management chair is to understand the phenomena and mechanisms of change in different societal and economic environments. The chair conducts research on the effects of change within the realms of business, government and society in general.
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ESSEC Innovation & Health Chair
In September 2019, the Chair of Innovation in Health and the Chair of Health systems merged.
The Innovation and Health Chair is a teaching and research chair.
The Chair’s educational objective is to train business leaders capable of:
1. Understanding the purpose of health systems, their complexities and their socio-economic constraints
2. Forecasting and using innovations in Health
3. Developing the manager’s systemic thinking for the analysis of the environment, anticipation of the consequences, and securing the action (competence through transversality).
The Chair offers two options of 75 hours of lessons each:
- one option on Health Systems and Health Marketing (in French)
- one option on Innovation in Health (in English).
The Chair also develops research programs on the explanatory factors of health costs and the diffusion of health innovation, the methods of evaluating health strategies, the competition in health insurance, the use of big data methods for the analysis of health insurance data, the choices made by patients in health systems.
The Chair has become an academic place of excellence for all actors in the health ecosystem.
Chair's website
ESSEC Managerial Innovation and Operational Excellence Chair
In the face of the challenges brought about by rapidly evolving business environments, the Managerial Innovation and Operational Excellence Chair, in collaboration with its partners, aims to promote sustainable business performance by implementing an efficient combination of managerial innovation and operational excellence. In partnership with Covéa, Eurogroup Consulting, Humanis and Renault-Nissan Consulting, the chair, led by Jean-Marie Peretti and David Autissier, aims to experiment, define and implement new forms of management which will serve to shape the business of the future.
Chair's website (in French)
ESSEC Media & Digital Chair
The Media & Digital Chair brings together ESSEC professors and industry professionals. Its goal is to train future managers with high potential, benefiting from sector specific knowledge in terms of businesses, to develop research, to analyze the fundamentals of the industry, to reflect on the issues faced by the industry and anticipate trends. It intends to open a laboratory of ideas and allow free thinking while giving partners a new perspective on the challenges faced by a sector at the confluence of our cultural, economic and political worlds.
Chair's website (in French)
ESSEC Sports Chair
The ESSEC Sports Chair trains future leaders in sports business and provides them with an understanding of sport as a complex global industry with multiple stakeholders, and of current trends such as new funding models, digital, and e-sports. The Chair also develops future leaders across different industries through “lessons learned” from sport, ranging from the development of individual strengths and values to the effective leadership of groups and teams. Its aim is to become a think tank on the subject of sports management, to create a research community, and produce high-level academic and applied research.
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Fast Moving Consumer Goods Chair
The Fast Moving Consumer Goods Chair was the first Chair created at ESSEC in 1985 by Daniel Tixier. The objectives of the chair were bold for the time: they were to regroup actors from the worlds of academia and industry around a single educational objective. Today, the Chair has become a center for excellence in France in training young people for careers in the world of consumerism. Indeed, it has created over the years a unique and dedicated community of teachers and business executives who work daily to help the next generation of actors in this sector grow through an ambitious program of courses, seminars, meetings, and research.
Chair's website (in French)
Food Business Challenges Chair
Today, most of the leaders of agri-food companies believe that the current systems will no longer be effective in ensuring the economic and societal objectives assigned to them, the first of which is to feed the world population while protecting the planet. ESSEC Business School and four leading food companies, Axéréal, Bel, Lesaffre & METRO, have decided to combine their skills and their expertise to create this new Chair. The objective of the chair is to train and to inspire the future industry leaders with an innovative mindset and a strong willingness to conduct the transition of Food Business with sustainable and reliable transition solutions. Together with partners and affiliates, we strive to reinvent tomorrow's food networks and businesses. The chair program is designed to provide participants with in-depth understanding of the food ecosystem, both from a human perspective and a technological point of view. It will also provide several approaches and tools to design and build the “transition for food and earth”.
Chair's website
Global Circular Economy Chair
The Global Circular Economy Chair holds a vision of a society in which the principles of the circular economy systematically become a priority in our economy, compared to the linear economy that wastes the resources of our planet. The key objectives are to train ambassadors to promote the circular economy as the best model to solve the major challenges of tomorrow (economic, environmental and social) in all organizations, and to train makers who will implement
and apply the principles of the circular economy to a specific project in their own environment while measuring its impacts. The Chair will also create a global ecosystem around the circular economy with every relevant actor around the world (companies, universities, associations, public actors).
Chair's website
Leading a Scale-Up Chair
More and more, small start-ups are moving quickly to hyper-growth SCALE-UPs - in value, revenue, and employee headcount. These scale-ups urgently need YOU: professionally-trained, business-focused talent that can support their hyper-growth and high-impact trajectories.
The "Leading a Scale-Up" Chair at ESSEC will prepare you to take on high-growth and high impact professional roles within scale-up companies or a company that is within the scale-up ecosystem. You will learn the unique leadership competencies needed to lead within hyper-growth organizations. You will learn how scale-ups grow organizationally and professionally to meet the agile demands of their growth, the market, and society at large.
Chair's website
LVMH Chair
The LVMH Chair, founded in January 1991 by ESSEC and LVMH Moët Hennessy - Louis Vuitton Group, is an educational and research program that specializes in luxury brand management. ESSEC was the first French Business School to create a Chair specifically dedicated to the luxury industry. As a specialized track of teaching and research in luxury brand management, the objective of the Chair is to provide MSc in Management and MMD students with a unique program combining: practical as well as theoretical knowledge related to various dimensions of luxury brand management, through lectures given by ESSEC professors as well as senior executives and managers from the LVMH group. It also gives participants hands-on experience through company visits, a field project and a professional internship.
Chair's website
Shaping the Future of Finance Chair
The "Shaping the Future of Finance" Chair is an educational complement to the Finance track offered by the Finance Department. With its first partner AXA IM Alts, the Chair seeks to have a transversal view on the forces that are shaping the future financial industry. The Chair gives a particular look at the sustainable finance issues and responsible leadership that are in the core of ESSEC values and pioneering spirit.
Chair's website
Social Innovation Chair
Created in 2003, the Social Innovation Chair was the first academic entity dedicated to social innovation and social entrepreneurship in France, with the objective of adopting the Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) organisational and management principles that had demonstrated their value in other sectors, and of training social entrepreneurs. Today, the Centre continues to pursue the objective of inspiring vocations in social and/or environmental impact entrepreneurship, professionalizing the SSE sector by building the capacity of existing impact enterprises. The Center also provides all businesses and organizations, and the public sector, with new skills to promote the development of impact innovation.
Each year, the Centre trains more than 20 ESSEC students and has a network of over 400 alumni with high-level responsibilities towards impact, in a wide variety of sectors and functions.
The Centre’s vision: a world where social, environmental and economic logics reinforce each other to enable territories, organisations and the whole economy to succeed in their transformation towards an inclusive and sustainable world.
Chair's website (in French)
Strategy and Information Governance Chair
Organizations face crucial challenges related to the governance of their information. Against this backdrop; the Strategy and Information Governance Chair offers an academic framework to meet these challenges. The Chair contributes to the advancement of knowledge related to the information governance. It provides a framework for anticipating market expectations, following a pragmatic and concrete approach. It benefits the entire ecosystem of private and public enterprises. Teaching and Research Chair, it constitutes a forum for privileged exchange between students, researchers, and practitioners. Using an appropriate pedagogy, students are thus trained in the concepts, methods, and tools of information governance. The researchers, attentive to the practitioners’ needs, ground their approaches in reality. Practitioners are thus at the forefront of thinking and developing information governance strategies.
Chair's website (in French)
Urban Economics Chair
Unique among major schools of management, the ESSEC Urban Economics Chair has been educating second and third-year students for over 25 years on the complex issues and value systems that surround the management of cities and territories. Focusing on both the public and the private, chair graduates are given the tools to promote economic development but also balance social, environmental and urban planning and launch careers as the managers of territorial corporate partners and executives of local bodies and their satellites.
Chair website (in French)
The Chair ICP-Essec Entreprises et Bien Commun
The Chair ICP-Essec Entreprises et Bien Commun is a place where students can reflect the important notion of "common good" for societies to-day. The State only is no longer considered as the unique actor for contributing to the common good; companies need to contribute too. The activities of the Chair will allow students to cooperate with both companies and students in humanities of the ICP (Catholic University of Paris). The courses will approach the notion of common good in a dual perspective of management and humanities; students will also be given the opportunity of exploring the issues of common good within companies, at a field level. The Chair is sponsored by major companies from different industries that are - each one in a very unique way - involved in contributing to the common good. As students of the Chair ICP-Essec, students will graduate in a University Degree "Entreprises et Bien Commun" that is awarded by ICP.
Chair website (in French)