Entrepreneurship and Startups

We interviewed Quentin Rouyer, the Founder and CEO of Alternative Café, a trailblazing fair-trade coffee importer and distributor. Through its unique model of importing directly from producers and advocating for in-country roasting, Alternative Café is revolutionizing the coffee industry's approach to sustainability. From its renowned World Coffee Challenge to its commitment to empowering growers, Alternative Café's innovative practices are reshaping the coffee sector while promoting social and environmental responsibility.

We interviewed the founders of two startups in HEC’s incubator at Station F that have come up with green innovations making a deep impact in their respective sectors. Genomines utilizes plants to selectively extract targeted metals, crucial for battery production, aiming to minimize environmental impact. Pixstart offers tailored satellite imagery analysis to monitor changes in water, forests, agricultural fields, and construction sites, optimizing environmental resource management and informing decisions.

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing all fields of business, forcing academics and practitioners to revise their fundamentals. To discuss these new challenges, HEC Associate Professor Carlos Serrano and his colleague Thomas Åstebro organized a groundbreaking workshop inviting some of the world’s top researchers to compare their approach to those of leading industrialists. In our latest Breakthroughs, we discuss some of the takeaways with Serrano, an academic in the school’s Department of Economics and Decision Sciences.

Around 1,200 participants congregated in Toronto for the first in-person CDL Super Session in four years. The two-day event featured intense exchanges between startups from the 24 CDL streams, mentors, researchers and academics. There were equally hard-hitting exchanges on AI, geopolitical shifts in innovation and the advancement of humanlike intelligence. HEC Paris sent a strong delegation to Canada to exchange on its growing involvement in this objective-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage companies.

Artificial Intelligence adoption by investors might hinder the allocation of capital to breakthrough innovations. Learn more in this interview with Maxime Bonelli, PhD student in Finance at HEC Paris, on his dissertation. Maxime focuses on the real effects of new technologies and human capital in the financial sector, to help us better understand how the industrial organization of the financial sector affects the real economy.

Qatar may have been significantly more resilient to the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic than other countries, thanks to its experience of economic blockade and a fast-growing digital entrepreneurship ecosystem that is actively transforming the country’s economy. This is the principal finding of a compelling new study led by Allan Villegas-Mateos, Research Associate at HEC Paris in Qatar.

Innovation thrives in teams where diverse thinking is not only encouraged but proactively encouraged. Gender diverse teams are shown to have improved performance. Despite the evidence demonstrating the impact of diversity, we still witness mixed reactions to gender diverse teams with the situation exacerbated following the pandemic. As organizations are rebuilding after the initial waves of the pandemic, we focus on why gender diversity needs to be at the heart of this transformation.

In this interview with Knowledge@HEC, a dozen of professors and Ph.D. students from HEC Paris share the key findings of their latest research on diversity and inclusion. They also share insights for managing one’s career in challenging contexts and give analysis on how education and the new generations can change the workplace culture.

The image of a Falcon rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule designed and manufactured by private company SpaceX as part of a NASA mission, has struck world public opinion in May 2020. Like its landing in the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks later, in early August. It illustrates the profound changes that have affected the space industry in recent years. In this article, Professor of international business law Lucien Rapp describes the transformation of the space industry and the strategies developed to enter the space market, as well as the challenges of its privatization for the future of the industry.