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Life Begins At 40: The Spirit Of Entrepreneurship Is Alive At Emlyon
40 stands for 40 — a start-up showcase. Courtesy photo
This article originally appeared in Ambition, the flagship title of AMBA, a global accreditation body that has been evaluating business schools around the world for almost 60 years and has 300 members across 57 countries.
A rich history of start-up support at Emlyon Business School dating back four decades has been given a new lease of life with the launch of a centralised institute that brings all its innovation offerings and activities under one roof. Tim Banerjee Dhoul visited the school's new city campus to find out more about its spirit of entrepreneurship
Emlyon was launched by entrepreneurs, having been established by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Lyon in 1872. Its first home was in the heart of the city, before its growth entailed moving to a new site in the suburbs of Écully one hundred years later. Now, with around 9,000 students and an alumni network of more than 45,000, the school has returned to the city centre. To mark its relocation, Emlyon is reasserting its emphasis on entrepreneurship and looking to ramp up its impact on the communities it serves.
'Since its creation, entrepreneurship has been a topic that we have developed at the school,' explains Emlyon's executive president and dean, Isabelle Huault. To co-ordinate its expertise and offerings around entrepreneurship, the school has created a new centre called the Institute for Impactful Entrepreneurship and Innovation (I2E). It launched last November, as part of the celebrations marking Emlyon's relocation to the Gerland district of France's second‑largest city.
Dean Isabelle Huault addressed the crowd as Emlyon marked its incubator's 40th anniversary. Courtesy photo
At its helm is entrepreneurship professor Frédéric Delmar. He says the new institute is the result of trying to put all Emlyon's activities in this area 'under a single umbrella' in a way that simplifies its offerings for those outside the school, making them more accessible and appealing.
'We're doing so many different things at so many different levels that it was difficult for an outsider to understand,' Delmar reasons, before adding: 'In this competitive market, our history of entrepreneurship had become a bit faded over the years.' Yet, as Delmar outlines, the school has an extensive and varied output in entrepreneurship that encompasses everything from research and course programming to its Makers' Lab; the latter of which is a prototyping workshop space where students can bring ideas to life using 3D printers, laser cutters and sewing machines.
Huault remarks that entrepreneurial spirit is embedded in Emlyon's DNA and points to the impact of the school's incubator in particular. Established in 1984, its 40th anniversary set the stage for the launch of I2E. 'Emlyon was the first business school in France to launch an incubator and since then, around 1,800 start-ups and 15,000 jobs have been created. So, the output is rather good and it's an important platform for highlighting and promoting our spirit of entrepreneurship.'
For Delmar, the time of the incubator's establishment in the 1980s came at 'the beginning of entrepreneurship as we know it.' He explains that the period remains 'very special' for scholars of innovation and new enterprise because of the way in which long-held belief in large organisations and the Fordism model of mass production began to be challenged by the development of IT and the emergence of young tech players, such as Apple and Microsoft.
With such deep roots, supporting entrepreneurs to get their businesses off the ground is something that holds a singular significance at Emlyon. 'We were the pioneer in this field in France and that's why having an incubator to help start-ups grow and develop is very important for a school like us,' enthuses Huault.
Today, the school's incubator has a distinct focus on learning, as its director Alexander Bell addresses. 'I believe that 80 per cent of the entrepreneurial process is method, so because we're a business school and because we teach and train, we're pretty good at that.'
The educational emphasis also sets the tone for entry into the incubator. 'We're looking to make sure that students learn throughout their entrepreneurial project,' Bell advises, adding that this entails assessing students' level of engagement and dedication to their proposed project. However, the incubator is also open to founders from outside the Emlyon community and here the business plans themselves warrant greater scrutiny before they are admitted. As Bell surmises: 'It's probably a bit stricter in terms of what we're looking for.'
Frédéric Delmar, director of the newly rebranded Institute for Impactful Entrepreneurship and Innovation speaks to those in attendance. Courtesy photo
Even so, the supportive learning environment remains a key distinguishing feature of the incubator and one that differentiates it from private incubators – for founders who seek it out, that is. After all, some entrepreneurs only want to sign up to an incubator to access certain resources, be those in relation to space, finance or industry connections. 'Whereas other teams will be looking for the kind of legitimacy and methods that a business school incubator can provide,' as Delmar points out.
Gaining the skills and experience required to pursue a career as an entrepreneur is central to many students' motivations for attending business school. For example, 26 per cent of respondents to the AMBA & BGA Student Survey 2023: Aspirations & Programme Experiences said they had embarked on their studies to become equipped to start their own business.
Aside from the learning and guidance on offer, one of the reasons for this is the chance to build and develop business ideas in a low-risk environment. 'When students are still studying, they have that space to test and learn and move forward on a project,' says Bell. This is important, he confides, because there's much less possibility of being judged for pursuing a project that doesn't quite work out if it happens during your time at business school, reasoning that 'in France, failure is not something that people like.'
However, what a student learns during their time at business school, or within an incubator or accelerator programme, becomes all the more important when they graduate and leave the relative sanctuary of its confines behind.
'When we measure what happens when you leave our incubator and accelerator programmes, we do see a dip in energy and mental health. You will have been in a supportive environment, but now you must learn to swim on your own and that's a big change for a lot of entrepreneurs,' maintains Delmar.
The I2E director says this is why entrepreneurship ecosystems extend to business and science parks, so that 'the transition is not too brutal' and that by working alongside other start-ups entrepreneurs remain 'in a setting where people would recogniSe what they are doing.'
There's recognition, too, that Emlyon can do more to support its graduate entrepreneurs beyond their time in the school's roster of programmes. In this sense, the move from Écully in the suburbs of Lyon to the new institute in the city centre is the chance it has been waiting for.
'This is why we decided to have this space and why it was so important,' Delmar declares. 'We're coming back to town and we're closer to entrepreneurs for whom it was not easy to come and visit. This will now be the space where both budding and experienced entrepreneurs can come, talk and keep in touch.'
He continues: 'We also know that we're only part of this; successful entrepreneurs often make sure that they end up in other kinds of professional networks not only because they're important for growth and business relationships, but also to be part of a community where your experiences are not unique. Talking about your challenges or successes with like-minded people is very important.'
Emlyon's new institute also hopes to address the start-up world's continuing gender imbalance, with the incubator's experiences to date often reflecting the global gender imbalance among founders, of whom approximately 70 per cent are male and 30 per cent are female.
Here however, Bell and Delmar advise, the problem lies not with the numbers gaining admission into incubator and accelerator programmes, such as those available at Emlyon, but far earlier; in the mind's eye of what students feel they can achieve in their careers and life.
'Entrepreneurship is commonly held up as one of the last professions that has in the main failed to adequately address the gender issue whereas in, say, medicine or engineering, you increasingly see more of a balance. This is an issue we hope to tackle but what we do know is that [the gap] happens at the early stages. We often talk about 'stand up', 'start up', 'scale up' and the problem really lies with the stand-up part, making sure that our female students understand that this is a path that they can pursue,' Delmar elucidates.
'We have mandatory classes where we teach entrepreneurship, but we also need to rethink what it means to be an entrepreneur, in a way that is independent of your gender. This ties into a broader issue of how we can be more inclusive,' the Emlyon institute director notes.
The school's dean believes that one way forward lies with showcasing the examples and experiences of existing female entrepreneurs. 'Our scholars work on this topic a lot and what I know is that we are lacking in female role models at the moment. We need more female entrepreneurs to promote the entrepreneurial spirit among women,' Huault reflects.
The event commemorated the incubator's history and looked to its future under a new name and structure. Courtesy photo
With the total number of female students at Emlyon already outnumbering their male counterparts, the aim is to include them in all the school's entrepreneurial activities and opportunities from the outset. In this, the Projet de Création d'Entreprise (Business Creation Project), or PCE, is one tool at the disposal of the school and its new institute. A well-known course at the school, it asks around 1,500 students each year to create their own business in teams right at the start of their programme.
'They might think we're crazy, but we really want to push them,' says Delmar. 'The PCE concept exists in other schools, such as Babson. The idea is basically to say: 'You don't know anything? We don't care. Here is a team of people that you have never met before. Go out, start your own business and come back next week to tell us what you have done.''
He continues: 'They go through the course and doubt us every step of the way, but they come out of it having completed a business plan presentation, or similar and they say, 'I never learned so much in such a short time about myself, about working in a team and about business.' It accelerates their learning – they discover a lot about what they want to do in the future, whether that's entrepreneurship or not.'
Regardless of their ambitions, Delmar pinpoints two key attributes that he feels all business students will need to walk away with: the ability to learn and the ability to embrace change.
'Learning to learn is important because we are living in an environment where increasingly, we see rapid changes,' he observes. 'As is the ability to adapt and see opportunities where other people might see problems… to see change as something positive and understand that while others might not view it in the same way, a leader's responsibility is to not leave anyone behind and ensure a positive experience and outcome for everyone in their team and company.'
A new institute housed within a new campus that has created a buzz about the school is the kind of change that seems set to yield a positive outcome at Emlyon. Notably, for Delmar, it allows the school to add some colour to its existing expertise and offerings around entrepreneurship and innovation, as well as to meet the needs of its students, alumni and wider business community.
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