Read the full inaugural speech

Sciences Po School of Management and Innovation

Remarks for the Opening of the Academic Year

24 August 2021

Natacha Valla, Dean

Dear all, Welcome!

This is a special day for you, because today marks the formal start of your journey with Sciences Po this year. Some of you are returning, others of you have made it through the selection process – particularly demanding this year - and you now are embarking upon a few years that will very likely change your lives : because these years will shape you intellectually, because you will get to meet colleagues, some of which might become lifetime friends, because you will get to work with professors who might turn out to be changing the way you look at the world, and because you will be well equipped for your professional life once you graduate.

This is also a special day for us. When I say “we” I mean Sciences Po, the School of Management and Innovation, and concretely the teams – programme directors, programme assistants, scientific advisors...- who will guide you through your journey. And we are very committed to living up to the standards you may expect from an Institution like ours. These standards mean a safe environment, smooth processes, a well-oiled administrative environment, but it also means delivering on our philosophy, our vision, our intellectual project and our set of values.

But before turning to that, let me say one word about the specific “pandemic”, or “post-pandemic”, context. We are sending a strong message this Autumn by opting for an on-campus “rentrée”. We are fully aware that uncertainty is still high as to whether the sanitary conditions will allow us to keep that modus operandi, but while it lasts, you should take full advantage.

Let me turn to describe the place in which you have landed, the School of Management and Innovation. Every school in Sciences Po has its specificity, and we are no exception. The common factor among them is that there is an extraordinary pluridisciplinarity in Sciences Po. This makes it a unique place: there is an invaluable permanent faculty in many fields of social sciences, economics, sociology, political sciences, history, law...but in complementarity with that, you will have the opportunity to learn from hundreds of professionals. Bankers, designers, human resources managers, consultants, lawyers…this richness will be gold for you.

About the School

What is the School of Management and Innovation? Some would say “it is a business school” – some would say “no, absolutely not!”. Others would say “it is a creative school”. Or even “the school to get a job in the private sector”. “To launch a start-up”. It is a little bit of all of that but instilled with SciencesPo’s DNA rooted in social sciences and the critical mind that comes with it.

Raison d’être rooted in the need for a new growth paradigm…

The School’s “raison d’être” starts with the necessity to fundamentally rethink about the engines of economic growth. I said economic growth and not capitalism, even though the first has implications for the second. Recent crises have shown that the nature, the pace and the future of global growth, are undergoing deep changes. We do not know how global growth will be divided across continents. Vulnerabilities are piling up: financial ones, with considerable amounts of debt that fragilise countries that were already fragile; socioeconomic, with inequality, equity and fairness coming at the center of “sustainability”; not to mention ecological threats related to climate developments.

By now we are all aware that there are clear market inefficiencies; that we are surrounded by coordination issues that are not benign and have created the need to move beyond the sheer « shareholder value » paradigm to fully grasp the contribution of firms and institutions to intertemporal social welfare. I will come back to that when I speak about governance and “responsibility” in capitalistic systems.

Considerable public policy responses have been implemented. Monetary policy has taken a role that is central to everybody’s lives, through very low interest rate policies and massive purchases and accumulation of assets on their balance sheets. And public finances have massively been mobilised to come to the rescue of countries so as to preserve stability and continuity in economic activity. But we now come to a time when people start to ask: “but when and how is this going to be reversed?”, “will inflation come back?”, “how will these very concrete policy adjustments affect the private sector?”. Growth, environment, public policies: those topics should move from the field of expertise to the “bread and butter” intellectual playground of the leaders, the decision-makers of tomorrow, that is, you, your generation. You will have to find out how these overarching conditions matter for institutions and firms: how will their day-to-day operations be affected? The resilience of their business model? How to handle the externalities human activity generates, in particular on the environment? What is their impact, and how to mitigate it?

…raison d’être also rooted in creativity, innovation, digitalisation…

The School’s “raison d’être” is also strongly rooted in creativity, innovation, digitalisation. I mentioned “creative school” at the beginning. This will speak to those of you who enrolled in the masters “communication, new media and creative industries”, “innovation and digital transformation”, perhaps “marketing and society” or “new luxury and art de vivre”. But what about those embarking in a master in finance? In strategy? Why on earth should you be bundled with creativity? Well, I think the financiers and strategists of tomorrow will need a fair deal of “constructive creativity” to invent the asset class that will manage to channel the excess savings that the world has accumulated into productive investment to protect the planet in the long term. You will need a fair deal of innovation to make sure that the stocks of “stranded capital” that might arise from the obsolescence of environmentally unfriendly technologies do not lead to economic stagnation but to economic and social prosperity. And so on.

When it comes to digitalisation, we realise at the School that “digital transformation” has been going on for so long that we prefer to speak about “digital dynamics”. We take this seriously. For the first time this year, our students will be offered a curriculum “Data&Digital” (D&D). When conceiving this curriculum, our priority was threefold: first to ensure that you all have D&D literacy at your own level, and this will be customised. This entails a bit of formalisation (algorithmic, data analytics and statistics). Second, to ensure that you are aware of, and master, what we call “digital management tools” in your field. Third, to make sure that you, as digital natives, develop a critical mind towards digitalisation in our lives and societies, the ability to evaluate the stakes of social media, the quality of information. We are very few in the world to offer such a balanced structure in “Data&Digital”. But please be clement to us. This is a first step, we will complete and improve the curriculum over time, and we will rely on your constructive feedback here.

…and governance…

Governance, Purpose. This should become part of your vocabulary. We are, in Europe, and in particular in France, in a very specific intellectual, institutional and corporate environment with regards to those topics. We have articulated, in law, the notions of purpose and “raison d’être” that go way beyond ESG. A few years back, the “loi PACTE” opened the way for a formalisation of those principles. This process has extremely concrete implications for the way firms are run.

There is a lot of conviction behind our vision here at the School. Last year, when we opened the 2020-2021 academic year, I stated the following: “that governance issues should lie at the core of what our students learn; that so should topics pertaining to innovation and creativity, and that data and digital should be central in their curriculum.” We are walking the talk.

Finally, you would not be at the School of Management and Innovation if I did not end my remarks with the recommendation to always demonstrate “Mündigkeit”. Look it up if you have never encountered the concept so far!