Entrepreneurship, Strategy & Innovation Department

Education/Pedagogy

We anchor our pedagogy in expert knowledge in the areas of entrepreneurship, strategy, business development, design and innovation drawn from our research expertise and our extensive professional experience. Furthermore, we develop our pedagogy in close relation with our ecosystem, ensuring the relevance of our courses to contemporary organizations, as we involve practitioners and managers in the teaching process. These links with local ecosystem help us develop and deliver courses inspired by the latest business practice and thinking relevant for future generation of entrepreneurs, managers and leaders. Finally, we deliver our courses through experiential learning techniques, and involve learners in the creation of new knowledge by embedding them in the local ecosystem by forging close relations with relevant stakeholders.

Our department is also a home for several Masters Specializations including Entrepreneurship, Marketing Design and Creation, and Business Development.

Research

We anchor our research in the theoretical ideas and our publications reveal the complexity of phenomena under investigation. Our researchers who specialize in entrepreneurship, strategy, business development, design and innovation subject areas are embedded in the mainstream and expert scholarly communities in which they collaboratively identify and respond to new challenges and pertinent research questions.

Our department is also a home to two research centers – Chair in Family Entrepreneurship and Society and Chair in Finance for Innovation. Research active members of our department are supported by our International Affiliate Faculty: Prof. Gideon Markman and Prof. Sarah Jack.

We publish our research in top tiers journals such as: Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Human Relations, Organization Studies, British Management Journal, Gender, Work & Organization, Journal of World Business, International Business Review, International Small Business Journal, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research, Technovation, Futures and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Our colleagues hold several editorial reviewer board positions, and are acting as editor in chief, associate editors or social media editors. Furthermore, our department members are involved in national and international networks scholarly and practitioner networks, like AOM, ECSB, BAM, EGOS, EURAM, ISBE and others.

EXPERTISES

Both entrepreneurship and strategy scholars embracing the practice turn focus on investigating practices, conceptualized as organized and sociomaterial human activities and enacted based on specific skills and tools. The practice turn informs both our research and pedagogy, research outputs being translated into learning and training innovations offered in classroom.

Embracing the practice turn questions and challenges knowledge production and sharing. Our department is engaged in exploring innovative ways of creating and transferring practice-based knowledge.

  • Entrepreneurship as Practice Conference @Audencia : Claire Champenois (organizer) Miruna Radu-Lefebvre, Natalia Vershinina, Sébastien Ronteau, Vincent Lefebvre (contributors)
  • Special Issue on Family Entrepreneuring @IJEBR : Miruna Radu-Lefebvre (guest editor)
  • Special Issue on Entrepreneurship as Practice @IJEBR : Claire Champenois (guest editor)
  • Family Entrepreneurship & Society Chair – Miruna Radu-Lefebvre (chair holder) Natalia Vershinina and Vincent Lefebvre (members)
  • Research contributions in Strategy as Practice – Tamim Elbasha
  • Entrepreneurship and Strategy Seminars (bachelor and master degree) – pedagogy focus on practice – Dan Evans, Sandrine Stervinou, Vincent Lefebvre (coordinators)
  • Entrepreneurship Specialization – Nil Gulari (head of specialization)
  • Business Modelling teaching – Valérie Claude Gaudillat
  • Business Modelling and Digitalization teaching & research – Sébastien Ronteau

Entrepreneurs, strategists, innovators, business owners, CEOs, and policy makers take decisions in an increasingly uncertain and volatile environment. To effectively cope with uncertainty, individuals adopt prospective thinking, foresight or futures perspectives to manage possible futures. In so doing, they make future(s)-based decisions, which orient their current choices and actions and those of their organizations.

Adopting foresight and futures perspectives offers novel opportunities to entrepreneurship and strategy scholars for better understand how organizations come into life and how they evolve. Such a perspective is fruitfully implemented in the classroom.

  • Masters in Marketing Design & Creation – Nicolas Minvielle (head of MS)
  • Executive education programs – Nicolas Minvielle & Jean-Michel Moutot
  • Supporting Pedagogical Innovation – Tamim Elbasha (head of service)
  • Family business certificate – Miruna Radu-Lefebvre & Vincent Lefebvre
  • Published learning innovation on past, present and future of family firms – Vincent Lefebvre & Miruna Radu-Lefebvre
  • Special Issue: Futures of Business School @Futures:  Kathleen Randerson (guest editor)
  • Special Issue on the future of family entrepreneurship @Futures. Kathleen Randerson (guest editor) Miruna Radu-Lefebvre & Vincent Lefebvre (contributors).
  • Research on “Belle Boite” today and tomorrow: Vincent Lefebvre
  • Strategic foresight as research and/or pedagogical project : Valérie Claude-Gaudillat

Entrepreneurship, Strategy and Innovation subjects encompass more than imagining, launching and structuring organizations, they are also concerned by developing and reinventing organizations over time. Growing ventures, identifying and mobilizing resources such as financing to support firm growth is a key concern of our department

Our focus on supporting, financing and growing businesses requires an in-depth understanding of how entrepreneurial/innovation ecosystems and industry clusters work. How do entrepreneurs and CEOs mobilize resources? How do business support professionals work to enhance entrepreneurs and CEOs’ performance? These questions are of major importance for our students as future entrepreneurs, managers or innovators as well as for practitioners and policy makers.

  • Chair Finance for Innovation – Benjamin Le Pendeven (chair holder)
  • Research contribution on financing – Gilles Certhoux, Benjamin Le Pendeven, Claire Champenois, Miruna Radu-Lefebvre, Vincent Lefebvre
  • Entrepreneurial finance modules and electives – Benjamin Le Pendeven & Gilles Certhoux
  • Entrepreneurial growth research projects and contributions – Natalia Vershinina & Vincent Lefebvre
  • Audencia Supporting Entrepreneurs Services for students and alumni– Gilles Certhoux & Sébastien Ronteau (heads of service)
  • Business Development Specialization – Jean-Michel Moutot (Head of MSc)
  • Supporting CEOs, Business owners and board members in developing their business – Jean Michel Moutot
  • Supporting SMEs’ in growth process – Jean-Michel Moutot
  • Research on networks and clusters as support mechanisms – Anna Gerke, Miruna Radu-Lefebvre, Vincent Lefebvre, Natalia Vershinina
  • Report on supporting business creation in Finland – Virva Salmivaara
  • Growth module and podcast show – Vincent Lefebvre

Engaging with entrepreneurship and strategy involves not only business emergence and transformation, but also identity (re)construction for those involved in these processes.

Moreover, there is no single way to be(come) entrepreneurs, innovators or strategists as there is no universal replicable model of what being an entrepreneur, an innovator, or a strategist means. The mechanisms by which our students and trainees build their professional identity differ from one context to another and from one individual to another.

Taking context and diversity into account means developing our awareness of social and psychological biases related to the perception and evaluation of others in order to enhance knowledge production and sharing, facilitating our students’ and trainees’ identity (re)construction as they engage with entrepreneurship, strategy or innovation.

  • Research contributions on gender equality – Natalia Vershinina and Miruna Radu-Lefebvre
  • Research contributions on diversity and inclusivity - Natalia Vershinina  
  • Understanding decision biases through pedagogy experience – Published Learning Innovation – Gilles Certhoux & Vincent Lefebvre
  • Entrepreneurial identity classes and podcast show – Vincent Lefebvre
  • Diverse organizational forms and missions: Sandrine Stervinou with focus on social enterprises and co-operatives, Natalia Vershinina with focus on ethnic minority entrepreneurship
  • Case studies on migration – Virva Salmivaara

Programmes

  • Entrepreneurship Specialization (Bachelor & Master)
  • MS Marketing Design and Creation
  • MSc Business Development
  • Core course – Entrepreneurship seminar
  • Core course – Strategy seminar
  • Track Entrepreneurship MBA
  • Module Entrepreneurship in several MS, MSc, MBA, MSIM
  • Module Strategy in several MS, MSc, MBA, MSIM

Research seminars

In research, we work at the individual (entrepreneur, leader, manager), organizational (start-up, SMEs, large companies and MNCs) and inter-organizational (networks, clusters, supply chains, ecosystems, stakeholder) levels. We take real-life practical issues as a starting point for empirical exploration and analysis, and engage in both qualitative and quantitative research design.

On Thursday afternoons, our department regularly invites renowned researchers working in France or abroad to present recent projects at Audencia. Head of Research also organize internal work-in-progress (WIP) research seminars, which allow faculty members and PhD students from Rn’B Lab to present and improve their work through discussion with their peers.

Planned for 2021-2022 are the following invited guests:

  • Prof. Frederick Wherry (Princeton University);
  • Prof. Gary Bruton (Texas Christian University);
  • Prof. Gideon Markman (Colorado State University);
  • Prof. Sarah Jack (Stockholm School of Economics);
  • Prof. Helle Neergaard (Arhus University)
  • Prof. Friederike Welter (IfM Bonn)
  • Prof. Pablo Munos (Durham University)

To strengthen the skills of our active researchers, at school level we have methodology workshops:

  • Using research software (e.g., NVivo)
  • Development and implementation of quantitative and qualitative methodologies (e.g., PLS)
  • Promoting research on social networks
  • Understanding external sources of funding

Rn’B Lab members actively participate in workshops to strengthen their skills in scientific writing and assessment of academic articles in the English language. Researchers also receive mentoring in a Higher Degree Research (HDR) approach to management science.

Team

Vincent Lefebvre

Head of department

Natalia Vershinina

Head of research affairs