The Startups

After 12 years and a string of student entrepreneur success stories, the Sciences Po Incubator is now opening its doors to alumni. Collaboration, networking, mentorship, a variety of business sectors... Bérengère de Drouas, in charge of development, explains what makes Sciences Po’s incubator so successful.

FEMPO are the first period-proof underwear made in France. When Fanny Abes, at the time a third-year student in Vancouver, met Claudette Lovencin, the idea for the product was born. They are now both Sciences Po graduates. We met with them to speak about their career paths and business.

One is dedicated to ridding it of plastic, the other to replanting its corals: two Sciences Po graduates explain how and why they have created a business devoted to protecting the oceans. In the context of the first Ecological Transition Careers Fair, we spoke to Marie Le Texier, Founder of ConsultantSeas, a consulting firm, and Anne-Sophie Roux, Founder of Tenaka.

In 2019,  Startup Columbia and Alliance, a joint programme between Sciences Po, Ecole Polytechnique, Columbia University and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, organized the very first Blockchain Innovation Challenge, a competition aiming to reward ventures that link blockchain innovation and social impact. The Sciences Po Centre for Entrepreneurship (FR) selected the startup Meditect to represent Sciences Po, which took home the grand prize. We interviewed co-founder Romain Renard, who is pursuing his Master’s in Finance and Strategy at the School of Management & Innovation.

Over 100 startups incubated, 1,000 businesses created, annual sales turnovers of tens of millions of euros, and resales worth hundreds of millions...These are the outstanding results of the Sciences Po Incubator on its 10th birthday, celebrated this year.  It was a pioneering scheme whose structure was one of the very first to be created at a university in the field of social sciences and humanities. We take a look back at the incubator over its 10 years with Maxime Marzin, Head of the Centre for Entrepreneurship at Sciences Po, who helped to set it up.

Tēnaka, a social business founded by Anne-Sophie Roux, recent graduate of the Sciences Po School of Research and supported by the Centre for Entrepreneurship, is the winner of the 2021 Alliance Social Enterprise Challenge! This social entrepreneurship competition organized by the Columbia Alliance awards a prize of U$25,000 to support the development of a social venture project. Thanks to this prize, Tēnaka will scale its solutions to regenerate the ocean and develop its partnerships within the French ultramarine territories of the Indian Ocean and Caribbean Sea. The social business, launched on the benches of Sciences Po in 2018, is now being accelerated by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, a US-based organization supporting promising startups through its intensive Ocean Solutions Accelerator Program.