The EDHEC Transformation Leap workshop: raising students' awareness of the company of the future

This article was originally published on edhec.edu - 02/09/2024 

On 26 August 2024, EDHEC Business School devoted the first day of the new academic year for its 750 Pre-Master's students to the EDHEC Transformation Leap, workshops in small groups designed to reflect on the challenges facing tomorrow's business. Organised on the school's Lille campus, this initiative is the first action in the ‘transformative journey’. This new vision of the student's journey, conceived as part of the 2024-2028 strategic plan, ‘Generations 2050’, will be based on fundamental courses and practical workshops focusing on the acquisition of three key skills: critical thinking, a sense of action and cooperation. 

Designing the company of tomorrow

During the EDHEC Transformation Leap, the students, divided into 100 teams, had to carry out four missions. The first two tasks involved defining what the company and manager of the future might look like. A corpus of academic articles was made available to the students to fuel their thinking and help them draw up a charter for the company of the future. The articles included research by EDHEC professors on the circular economy, greenwashing and managing paradoxes. 

"We want to get students thinking about the profound changes taking place in businesses, such as the emergence of the net positive business model, dreamt up by Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever and co-author of the book "Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take", explains Juliette Gadaud, Director of the EDHEC Pre-Master's programme. The aim of this workshop is to develop students' critical thinking and analytical skills, as well as enabling them to acquire new knowledge."

The other two assignments offered as part of the EDHEC Transformation Leap were exercises in discovering auditing (an introduction to cash flow analysis) and strategy consulting (understanding how to combine economic performance and CSR policy). 

Discovering project management

This back-to-school seminar was also an opportunity to introduce the new students to project management methods. "During the EDHEC Transformation Leap, all the Pre-Master's students were introduced to project management,’ explains Juliette Gadaud. Just like in the business world, each team had to divide up the tasks and work collectively to meet the different requirements."

The EDHEC Transformation Leap is the first stage of the ‘transformative journey’, and will be followed by the Innovation Sprint, from 28 August to 24 September, a seminar that invites students to work together to solve societal problems with the aim of making a positive impact; a fresco of new narratives, in the week of 16 September, a collaborative workshop to reflect on the expression of new models of society; and an annual course devoted to planetary limits.