On 9 August 2021, the IPCC published its latest report. It presents troubling possible climate futures, highlighting in particular an alarming rise in temperatures despite the commitments made by governments. It is clearer than ever that the action, or inaction, of States is pivotal in this matter.
On my personal journey, I have often wondered how I could look out for others and the planet, without losing sight of my own interests. When I met Theory U by MIT’s Otto Scharmer, it changed my life. This theory offers a framework and steps to build action-confidence in the face of uncertainty....
Interview with Margherita Pagani, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at SKEMA Business School and Renaud Champion, Primnext CEO, co-editors of the new released book Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Value Creation (Edward Elgar Publishing). This book intend to open up the debate…
Numerous players are being invited to change their perspectives to accelerate the transition to the circular economy. The role of the academic sector in this transition will also require a paradigm shift.
The pharmaceutical industry, faces a paradox: the Covid-19 vaccine was created in just one year, compared to the usual ten years, even though the financialisation of the pharmaceutical industry has caused R&D spend as a proportion of turnover to dip in many countries....
Incumbent utilities are central players in the decarbonization process of the energy industry, but how do they transform their business models reliant on fossil fuels to more sustainable ones?
Topic: Digitalization in higher education: How I redesigned design thinking by creating app prototypes with my students "When I was asked to teach a design thinking course, I wanted to make sure that my students maximised the value of the…
After 60 years of setbacks and negotiations, months of engineering studies and weeks of execution, Christo’s final posthumous work, L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, is now on public display for two weeks. While its artistic value may be a matter for debate, its financing is exemplary since no public funding was needed.
Faced with the conjunction of the financial, health and ecological crises, economic thought is in disarray. A deep-rooted idea remains that these crises are mere digressions, from which we should be able to return at the previous state. However, there are grounds for believing the hypothesis that our economic model is undergoing a profound transformation....
Skin lightening is an age-old practice dating back to the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. It spread from Asia to the American continent. According to the WHO, 40% of African women currently engage in this practice. But using chemical substances in an attempt to whiten the skin can cause irreversible damage. This article examines this fantasy that is as timeworn as it is hazardous to health.
Interview with Dr Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné, professor of economics and corporate social responsibility. Abstract: Ethics can be defined as the reasoned consideration of an issue in order to do what is ‘right’. It brings us to think about the values and…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens of the land of Louis Pasteur, the father of immunization, showed a marked unwillingness to be vaccinated. Rather than being limited to France, might this distrust be the symptom of an ailment affecting high-income countries?
Can a business firm be lead to foster social and environmental goals while striving for shareholder value? This video present SKEMA professor Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné's explanation of this question. More information at: —————– About ThinkForward SKEMA ThinkForward is a knowledge-sharing…
After a $900bn package approved in late December 2020, in March 2021 the Biden administration launched a second stimulus worth $1,900 billion, mainly to support households and increase public spending. Shortly afterwards, President Biden announced an investment plan aiming to boost economic growth, together with a plan for families and education.
Economists then asked the effects of such an enormous stimulus on the US economy, wondering whether it would cause it to overheat. They also began to question the global consequences of these two plans.
Where are the most innovative employees within organizations? What is their position in the informal knowledge-sharing network and the formal organizational structure? What is the relationship between formal and informal dimensions?
It is difficult to convey the challenges of managing innovation without fully immersing students in a practical environment. So when Covid 19 locked everyone behind a screen, we needed to act fast to rethink the Innovation course in our International Marketing and Business Development program.
Many claims are made for fintech as a potentially disruptive force – but does it really help firms raise funds and provide new opportunities for investors?
Last March, Joe Biden's first economic recovery plan was adopted by Congress. With a budget of 1900 billion dollars, it is intended to directly help millions of American households. A second $2.3 trillion "Build Back Better" investment plan will invest in infrastructure, education and health care to create millions of jobs and combat climate change. These plans contain fiscal provisions that bring them closer to Keynesian policies.
Populism is a complex ideology that first appeared in Russia in the late 19th century. At the time, it was a movement started within the progressist, democratic and demophilic intelligentsia, which advocated genuine concern for the populace with the aim of helping and educating them, but also of maintaining contact between the social elite and the common people. Since then, the nature of populism has changed and there is a strong possibility that the political actions of its representatives, carried out on behalf of the people, are now turning against the latter and risk pushing them further into poverty.
In this forth Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle SKEMA Business School is pleased to welcome Professor Gerd Gigerenzer to discuss about decision making under uncertainty.
It is relatively understudied what happens if a Merger and Acquisition (M&A) deal combines with an activist investor campaign on the deal itself. In theory, there could be situations where activist investors aim to change the outcome of a M&A through a campaign. Do we observe such cases in reality?
In the recent article published by Journal of Risk Management in Financial Institutions, we observe that the pandemic crisis has revived the issue of debt cancellation for developing countries, placing debt relief on the front burner of multinational institutions and OECD governments. Most often the argument is that social justice should lead to forgiving debts to break the subordination of poor countries with the purpose to ‘reset the counters’....
Often a hostage to ideological bias, the ties between religion and economic development are a sensitive issue. In adopting a consilience approach, we can cool the debate by demonstrating the complexity of the links, and the sometimes unexpected effects of religion in the socio-economic sphere.
COVID-19, quels scenarios et perspectives de rebond pour l’économie mondiale ? Dans cette première masterclass de 35 minutes, il sera question de détailler les différents scénarios possibles de rebond pour l’économie mondiale suite à la crise sanitaire. Pour en savoir…
The covid 19 crisis has led to a huge bike boom in urban areas around the world.
However, will leading cities really “Copenhagenize”?
Contestability is a term often used by economists to mean that a market is competitive simply because players can enter and leave freely. This concept has been used to justify deregulation policies implemented to reduce legal barriers in various sectors such as air transport and ride-hailing services.
In the Learning Differently series, SKEMA professors will share their experiences of learning and teaching. Being well-versed in the complexity that comes with globalisation, innovation and digitalisation in higher education, they successfully tackle the current challenges in education (millennials, continuing…
American GDP figures published on 28 January 2021 show that the country’s economy continued to grow in Q4 2020 at an annualised rate of 4% compared to the previous quarter. This figure follows on from Q3 2020’s mechanically highly elevated…
Freakonomics is a word for an original way to view the world, by uncovering the influence of economic prompts and cognitive biases in particular on our choices. This type of research purports to reveal unconscious or unexpected factors that are confirmed by scientific studies, and this makes it even more intriguing. But as the astronomer Carl Sagan highlighted, the problem is that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. And such evidence does not always exist, as we will see.
What is Modern Slavery?
What has it got to do with business?
What is being done about it in business and management education and research?
The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) require that business know and show that they respect human rights. They can do so by conducting human rights due diligence and by translating and embedding human rights throughout their organization.
In the past Financial Modelling courses I taught, I would always use the same case study for the exams, but often felt the limitations of this. What I wanted for my students was a challenging multi-faceted activity that would make them apply critical thinking in different ways.
Resilience has a broader implication for supply chains affected by wars, natural catastrophes, social and economic upheavals. Resilience is the ability to come back to a previous state after a disruption and be even stronger than before ....
Global warming is an established reality whose effects, which are now tangible for everyone, are potentially harmful for the planet. Yet, it can also bring with it unexpected opportunities...
In this Third Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle, Sergei Guriev discusses key insights from his most recent research about Autocracy and Autocrats. Sergei Guriev is the Scientific Director of Sciences Po's Master's and PhD programmes in economics. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association.
You should change your business model! We regularly hear this injunction from mentors coaching startups or from strategy consultants called by managers to improve the performance of their (small or large) company. This may be true… or not.
The transportation sector is one of the most polluting sectors in the world. Even though alternative fuel vehicles have been around for decades, they only have a very small share in the vehicle market....
We are all trying to figure out what tomorrow holds, either by making our own predictions or by listening intently to those made by others, particularly the experts...
I had once gone to 2-day Design Thinking workshop where the theme was Transportation. Unfotunately, at the end of the journey I still found myself thinking that the problem we tackled was too abstract and the work done during the designing thinking phases too superficial. So when I was asked to teach a Design Thinking course, I really wanted to make sure that my students maximised the value of the design thinking method.
Initially expected to reach around 1.1 billion dollars, the global esports market was valued at just over 950 million U.S. dollars, a 0.8% difference that can be attributed to the cancellation of tournaments and competitions.
And yet, the long-term forecasts for esports remain favourable. The global market revenue should reach 1.6 billion U.S. dollars in 2023.
In this Second Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle organised by Professors Rodolphe Desbordes and Frédéric Munier,
Richard Davies discusses key insight from his recently published book Extreme Economies
This year’s Nobel prize for Economics was awarded to Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, both of Stanford University, for their work on auction theory and design.
In the 1980’s, during my doctoral studies at Yale University, I was very fortunate to have Paul Milgrom as my thesis advisor...
Recently, young environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s visit to France’s National Assembly caused quite a stir. Critics were quick to point out her young age and her lack of scientific credentials. Yet if there is one thing that her detractors cannot deny, it is that her speech has had spectacular and unexpected effects.
Since the mid-2000s, corporate financial reporting in many countries around the world is regulated by International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). This means teaching an international set of standards to an international audience. Interviewing practitioners and leading academics allows me to demonstrate the diversity of practice hidden behind the homogeneity of the rules and the need for judgment.
First Interview of the ThinkForward Conferences cycle organized by Professors Rodolphe Desbordes and Frédéric Munnier.
Stéphanie Chasserio Interviews Zahra Hankir. She is the award-winning, best-selling editor of Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World.
Zahra writes about the intersection of politics, culture, and society in the Middle East. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Vice, BBC News, Al Jazeera English, Businessweek, Roads & Kingdoms, and Literary Hub, among other publications.
Everybody knows Kahoot!, but there are many more tools that you can use to gamify your lessons....
Why do firms work together to contribute to environmental sustainability? Do firms aim for a cleaner environment for future generations or do they intend to benefit from promoting sustainability?
Academic careers depend on the researcher’s capacity to publish scientific articles in the best journals in their field. Publication is the deciding factor for promotion and peer recognition. Women are less present in this race and their numbers decrease the further up the academic ladder we look.
In the field of social psychology, cognitive dissonance is the tension experienced by an individual when their thought system, feelings or behaviour are conflicting. In its own way, slavery placed our societies in a state of cognitive dissonance: the proclamation of human rights coexisted with the reduction of people to the status of objects deprived of rights. To this day, this reality is often overlooked.
Crowdfunding is very new and exciting. It provides new opportunities for startup founding and other activities and proposes creative ways to reward investors. But today, is so new that we are only just becoming aware of all the gaps in our knowledge.
