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Entrepreneurship, Strategy & Innovation
Our teaching draws on the expertise of our faculty in entrepreneurship, strategy, business development, design, and innovation.
Education & Teaching
Our expertise is based on our own research and professional experience. We develop our teaching in close collaboration with our ecosystem, involving practitioners and managers in the teaching process. This ensures that our courses are relevant to today's organizations. These connections to the local ecosystem help us develop and deliver courses inspired by the latest practices and knowledge for the next generation of entrepreneurs, managers and leaders. Finally, we focus on experiential learning. We engage learners in the creation of new knowledge. Whenever possible, our classes allow students to become participants in the local ecosystem for the duration of the class, giving each student the opportunity to build strong relationships with relevant stakeholders.
Our department is home to several degrees and specializations at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including entrepreneurship, marketing, design and creation, and business development.
Research
Research within the department is at once conceptual, theoretical and empirical. It aims to bring greater understanding to the complex phenomena and realities faced by economists. Our researchers are specialists in entrepreneurship, strategy, business development, design and innovation. They are committed stakeholders in the scientific communities in which they identify and respond in a collaborative manner to new challenges and research questions.
Our department is also home to two research chairs: the Family Entrepreneurship and Society chair and the Finance for Innovation chair. Department members receive invaluable support from members of our international affiliate faculty.
The research of department members is published in leading scientific 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. Among the department's members, several hold key positions on the editorial boards of renowned journals, acting as editors-in-chief, associate editors or social media managers. In addition, members of our department are involved in national and international networks of researchers and practitioners, such as AOM, ECSB, BAM, EGOS, EURAM, ISBE and others.
Researchers in entrepreneurship and strategy who embrace the "practice turn" focus on the study of practices, conceptualized as organized human activities endowed with sociomateriality and implemented on the basis of specific skills and tools. The practice turn guides both our research and our teaching, with research findings being translated into course content for undergraduate and graduate students.
The adoption of the practice turn raises questions and presents many challenges in both the production of knowledge and its sharing. Our department is committed to exploring innovative ways to create and share practice-based knowledge.
Entrepreneurs, strategists, innovators, leaders, and policymakers make decisions in an increasingly uncertain and volatile environment. To deal effectively with uncertainty, individuals use foresight to manage possible futures. They make decisions based on the future(s) that guide their actions and those of their organizations.
Adopting a foresight perspective offers new opportunities for entrepreneurship and strategy professionals to better understand how organizations emerge and evolve. Such a perspective is also being applied to great effect in the classroom.
Engaging in entrepreneurship and strategy involves not only the emergence and transformation of firms, but also the (re)construction of the identities of the people involved in these processes.
There is no one way to be an entrepreneur, innovator, or strategist, because there is no universal, replicable model of what that means. The mechanisms by which our students and interns construct their professional identities vary from context to context and from individual to individual.
Taking into account context and diversity means developing our awareness of the social and psychological biases associated with the perception and evaluation of others in order to improve the production and sharing of knowledge and thus facilitate the identity (re)construction of our students and trainees when they engage in entrepreneurship, strategy or innovation.
Issues related to entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation are not limited to the conception, creation and structuring of organizations, but also concern the evolution and reinvention of organizations over time. Business growth, identifying and mobilizing resources such as financing to support business growth is a key concern of our department.
Our focus on coaching, financing and business growth requires a deep understanding of the functioning of entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as innovation and sector clusters. How do entrepreneurs and decision-makers mobilize resources? How does the entire consulting profession work to improve the performance of organizations? These questions are of major importance to our students as future entrepreneurs, managers and innovators, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers.
Research Seminars
In our research, we work at the individual (entrepreneur, leader, manager), organizational (start-up, SME, large corporation and multinational) and inter-organizational (network, cluster, supply chain, ecosystem, stakeholder) levels. We start from practical, real-life questions to explore them empirically, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches.
On Thursday afternoons, our department regularly invites renowned researchers working in France or abroad to present their latest projects at Audencia. The Research Managers also organize internal research seminars on work in progress, which allow faculty members and PhD students from the Research & Business Lab to present and improve their work through discussion with their peers.