Entrepreneurship and Innovation Enter High Schools with the HEC Young Innovators Program

In June 2024, HEC Paris welcomed young high school students for the HEC Young Innovators Program. Organized in collaboration with Lycée Léon Blum of Créteil, this project aims to immerse students in the world of entrepreneurship through the execution of a concrete project.

Since November 2023, approximately 550,000 students in their first year of general or technological high school must complete a mandatory two-week internship in June. Although this decree aims to promote their future professional integration, inequalities already exist.

Many students struggle to find interesting internships and about one-third find none at all, due to a lack of local or family networks. This issue, highlighting the disparities among youth, affects students, principals, and teachers alike.

To address this pressing need, Julien Lévy, Associate Professor and Scientific Director of the Entrepreneurship & Innovation Institute at HEC Paris, and Jean-Rémi Gratadour, MBA Professor and Executive Director in charge of programs at the same Institute, launched a pilot session of the HEC Young Innovators Program in June 2024, in partnership with Lycée Léon Blum of Créteil.

This project, supported by Principal Jacques Rusin and teachers Chloé Bouguereau and Éric Lacheny, enabled 25 high school students to participate in an innovative educational initiative on entrepreneurship during the internship period for first-year high school classes. The first session proved to be particularly fruitful!

Young Innovators Program

Ten days were all it took for students from Lycée Léon Blum to discover the fundamentals of entrepreneurship through the lens of innovation. With the HEC Young Innovators Program, participating high school students were able to:

• Understand how projects are developed and launched today,
• Gain confidence in their ability to initiate personal and collective projects,
• And learn to communicate effectively.

The program, delivered in a hybrid format (online, in-person in Créteil, and a final session on campus), is based on a pedagogy specifically developed for first-year high school students, focusing more on narrative than conceptual, more inductive than theoretical, thus emphasizing the acquisition of practical and interpersonal skills.

Alongside the high school students and their teachers, two HEC Paris professors, Julien Lévy and Jean-Rémi Gratadour, provided their insights. Both are driven by the same mission: to support younger generations in their educational journey by introducing them to the stages of developing a project or a business.

For Jean-Rémi Gratadour, the intention behind this program is to offer a methodology and pedagogy suited to developing an entrepreneurial project. Thus, "the young learn about themselves while learning to work collectively, and they emerge stronger [...], better equipped to become citizens with a drive to collectively solve existing problems through innovative approaches," explains Jean-Rémi.

A Program Aligned with HEC's Core Values

This initiative, presented as an immersive internship for students, integrates multiple skills and values. Beyond the entrepreneurial spirit, a cardinal value of HEC Paris, curiosity, responsibility, excellence, and diversity characterize this program.

Curiosity and Responsibility at the Heart of the Project

Through the HEC Young Innovators Program, high school students were invited to explore the many facets of entrepreneurship. They initiated projects, sharpened their critical thinking, and broadened their understanding of the economic world.

Eloïc Peyrache, CEO of HEC Paris, himself praised the students' willingness to develop their entrepreneurial mindset to tackle challenges collectively. "Believing that one has an individual responsibility to provide a solution is, in a way, the trademark of HEC," he states, and this is what he observed among the students of Lycée Léon Blum.

Indeed, the students were able to develop their sense of responsibility, initiative, and discover that any innovation must align with market realities. This approach, which fosters curiosity, allowed them to understand the importance of aligning innovation with economic, social, and environmental challenges.

Excellence as the Benchmark

During the 10-day program, the young participants were strongly encouraged to surpass themselves, both for their personal satisfaction and to achieve excellence through their projects.

Chloé Bouguereau, a senior teacher at Lycée Léon Blum, explains that the students gained much more than technical skills. The development of their entrepreneurial project was a “real opportunity for students to [ ...] develop both hard and soft skills, such as the ability to work in a team, become autonomous, meet deadlines, go into the field, and enhance their public speaking skills with pitching.”

This pursuit of excellence, which permeates the entire program, is evident in the students’ project presentations. Though undertaken as a group, the project allows each high school student to fulfill their desire to exceed their own limits and go beyond their personal best.

Diversity as an Essential Component

Being a laboratory for all forms of diversity to foster more exchange and tolerance is the ambition of HEC Paris. The pilot of the HEC Young Innovators Program was indeed aimed at students from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, for whom barriers to professional integration are numerous: lack of knowledge about the corporate world and its codes, feelings of inaccessibility or incompatibility with certain careers...

Thanks to the Young Innovators Program, high school students were able to discover new career orientation perspectives. José Karlie Louima, a student from Lycée Léon Blum, recounts how this program provided him with keys to confidence and communication—assets that will be valuable in the working world. As for his classmate, Nathan Candir, this internship allowed him to gain new insights into the functioning of businesses, pushing him to consider studying management, perhaps even at HEC.

Learning by Doing: A Practice-Oriented Methodology

Like all programs offered by the HEC Paris Entrepreneurship & Innovation Institute, the HEC Young Innovators Program is based on a hands-on method, also known as ‘learning by doing.’ Jean-Rémi Gratadour, co-founder of the program, emphasizes that this approach allows students to go beyond theory, to discover themselves, and to strengthen their potential for public speaking.

To conclude the program, students had the opportunity to present their project, in a structured manner and without notes, during the final pitch at HEC Paris in front of a jury. This highly educational exercise enabled the high school students to develop their persuasive abilities and test their ideas in real-world conditions. Among the jury members were Eloïc Peyrache, CEO of HEC Paris, and Nelson Vallejo-Gomez, Inspector General of National Education, who were impressed by the students' presentations.

Chloé Bouguereau, who found this oral work to be of utmost importance, is convinced:

"The students will be able to reinvest these soft skills in their future educational and career projects."

A Will to Scale Up

Buoyed by its success, the program aims to expand to reach twenty high schools by 2025 and one hundred by 2026. This expansion will require various resources, including:

• As many partnerships as high schools involved, reaching 100 by 2026,
• Training 70, then 300 high school teachers in the HEC method,
• An online educational platform incorporating generative AI,
• Partnerships with companies and startups to integrate coaching or gather local testimonials,
• Funding.

Given the scarcity of programs for under-18s, this project represents a genuine opportunity for high school students. It also reinforces HEC Paris's commitment to addressing this young audience with an inclusive and social approach.

About the HEC Paris Innovation & Entrepreneurship Institute

The institute supports entrepreneurs from all backgrounds. Through our Incubation & Acceleration, Deeptech, and Social Entrepreneurship centers, we help students with innovative ideas, budding startups or booming unicorns, accelerating SMEs or transforming large companies, as well as social or environmental entrepreneurs, to develop effectively and with impact. Here, the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem of HEC Paris converges to enable you to Make it Happen, Make it Big.