Three key areas of expertise at emlyon business school

Expertise area #1
Anticipating and adapting to transformation

For businesses in every sector, beset by technological, market, and socio-economic disruptions, the need to undertake total or partial transformation can be essential, even existential.

Designed to boost overall performance through better customer satisfaction, lower operating costs, and increased productivity, transformational change initiatives are one of the toughest endeavors a leader can embark on—with many failing and most proving to be far harder and more complex than first imagined.

Senior leaders leading transformation need to understand how and when to provide strategic direction, but also when to stand back and empower their teams to work through the details of how products and processes will change—encouraging an open, transparent dialogue and focusing on unleashing talent within the firm.

Moves towards environmental sustainability, promoting diversity and inclusion, the adoption of flatter organizational structures, and the need for business model innovation, all of these developments stand or fall through the positive commitment of the workforce, and therefore through the quality of leadership. The key to anticipating and managing transformations successfully comes down to strategy and leadership.

“Most often, the problem is not hard skills,” explains Gilles Basset, Director of Development Tailored Training Programs at emlyon points out, “it is about the links between strategy and hard skills, and the solutions require leadership and soft skills.”

Expertise area #2

Reinventing managerial practices fit for the future

In order to adapt to changing market environments and new concerns from AI to globalization, companies must develop their teams' managerial and collaborative capacities, and establish a sense of corporate purpose that takes account of wider environmental and social issues.

Helping to build these capacities, emylon’s approach is to create learning initiatives based on each company’s real situation. The school’s custom program team use scenario-based learning to generate contexts that are very close to the working reality of the client’s company—from the cases taught, to the projects groups work on.

In order to bring this context-centred approach to life for participants, experiential learning is a key learning methodology for emlyon. By engaging learners in hands-on experiences and reflection, they are able to connect theories and knowledge learned to real-world situations, enabling participants to practice the skills they have freshly acquired.

“When we create experiential programs for leaders we try to put them outside of their comfort zone. We create a context for leaders to help them practice dealing with a VUCA world, to be comfortable with uncertainty,” Gilles Basset, Director of Development Tailored Training Programs at emlyon business school.

Expertise area #3
Creating cultures of intrapreneurship

For large companies—often rigidly set in established structures, business plans and ways of working—innovating and adapting for the future can be very difficult. It is important they develop executives able to take direct responsibility for turning ideas into profitable new business plans—individuals who can think creatively, innovate, manage risks, and take assertive action within the organization—a profile that can be neatly described as 'intrapreneurs.’

To build intrapreneurial capacity within, organizations need to develop employees with a ‘start-up’ mindset, who can move from an idea to a supported concept with a well-structured business plan, pitch it successfully internally, and create a motivated team able to trial, develop, and implement the concept.

emlyon, along with its Institute of Intrapreneurship, works with companies to help build cultures of entrepreneurship and release ‘intrapreneurial’ talent into their ranks. With its close ties to industry, the school has been a leader in this field for many years, and intrapreneurship is integral to many of its customized programs.

"We started our first courses dedicated to intrapreneurship in 2005,” recalls Véronique Bouchard, Professor of Strategy and Corporate Entrepreneurship, “a few years later, large groups such as Orange France Telecom, the pharmaceutical group Bristol-Myers Squibb, MACIF, and the industrial group Plastic Omnium, turned to us."

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