HEC Lab: Making the Transition Possible
Ambition
The Making the Transition Possible and Desirable Lab positions the climate transition as a genuine economic and societal project. It explores sustainability as a lever for competitiveness and cohesion by rethinking markets, business models, behaviors, and the industrialization of green technologies.
It also aims to ensure that 100% of HEC students and executive education participants understand these systemic challenges and take action through an immersive residency format.
Sustainability, social resilience, and the climate transition must not be viewed as constraints but as a historic opportunity to reinvent our understanding of performance, innovation, and responsibility.
HEC Paris stands out for its unique ability to connect cutting-edge academic research, pedagogical innovation, and field experimentation with companies, public institutions, and civil society.
This Lab brings together multiple areas of expertise—finance, economics, management, law, entrepreneurship, social sciences, and technology—to shed light on the systemic challenges that stakeholders must address.
The Lab’s work will focus particularly on:
- redefining value to fully integrate environmental and social impact into economic and financial performance;
- innovative and systemic ideas to structure (international) markets capable of reconciling the climate transition, sustainability, and business competitiveness (particularly in Europe);
- methods for measuring and monetizing externalities, both positive and negative, to guide decision-making;
- designing new circular, regenerative, low-carbon, solidarity-driven, and resilient business models suited to emerging climate constraints;
- the evolution of organizations to orchestrate decarbonization, climate adaptation, and new forms of operational resilience;
- scaling up new technologies (GreenTech) and transforming value chains to accelerate the energy transition.
In parallel, the Lab will develop key pedagogical innovations:
- integration of the transition across all degree programs;
- new training programs for managers and executives;
- short online courses to widely disseminate knowledge, aligned with HEC’s public-interest mission.
- 2009, creation of the Sustainability & Organizations Institute: more than 15 years of expertise and thought leadership on systemic transition issues.
- Two IPCC representatives and more than 20 internationally recognized professors from various departments (finance, economics and decision sciences, accounting, strategy, operations, human resources and management, marketing) working on the climate–society–sustainability nexus.
- SASI Master: more than 100 students trained each year in this leading European program (over 350 hours of specialization).
- Coordinator of the Business Schools for Climate Change (BS4CL) network (with Oxford, Imperial, LBS, IMD…) and member of EU-level decision-making on the climate transition.
