HEC Paris has now written its values:
Curiosity, Responsibility, Excellence, Diversity, and Entrepreneurial Spirit.
Obviously, we relate the most to the last one, and we recognize ourselves in each of them.
This doesn't mean that we are - yet - excellent, fully diverse and responsible. But we are definitely aiming at it.
One thing for sure is that we are now more committed than ever to supporting ventures that contribute to a more inclusive, prosperous and sustainable world.
If that goal speaks to you, then please share this newsletter with companies and entrepreneurs that want to join us in shaping a more desirable future.
Now that we are crossing the mid-2021 mark, let's explore our past and future together.
Explore the Past with Us
🌻 Summer '20: 70 startups supported in parallel
(as we did since summer '17)
When we got out of the first - then unexpected - lockdown, we definitely understood that bringing our personal decisions to the collective level could have a huge impact. And that's when we decided to create this very newsletter, to share with you all that our community was building.
We had more energy than plans, but we would build it along as we go.
"Rediscover" the startups of the Summer 20 batch
🍂 Fall '20: 90 startups supported in parallel
At this point, we were constantly putting out fires of our own making, but only because our foundations had been in need of cleansing for a long time.
Doubling the size of our team at once added a lot of creative fuel that would start to challenge all our existing habits, good and bad. One thing was for sure, we were evolving and each one of us had to find the best place to reach its own Ikigai.
It was also when we realised that the value we provide to startups was and should be decorrelated from our office space, and this is when we first test our online program with Doctoclass, Mewo and Beev.
"Rediscover" the startups of the Fall 20 batch
❄️ Winter '21: 110 startups supported in parallel
Then, brainstorming was over. Decisions were made for each team member to spend the season learning, documenting, researching and implementing the projects we had agreed upon.
This is when we automated a lot of our processes, freeing us time to develop our ecosystem. Our new intern, Diane, arrived in a job that has been completely transformed and that needed to be reinvented. 6 months later, we can all agree on the amazing job that she did on helping us pinpoint our weaknesses 😇.
It can be easy to forget your initial drive - helping startups and project owners - when you are focusing too much on growth.
"Rediscover" the startups of the Winter 21 batch
🌷 Spring '21: 130 startups supported in parallel
Come spring, our business development efforts were starting to bear fruits, and we are fully experiencing the length of bigger institutions sales cycles.
We then took part of an internal initiative at HEC Paris to train business development staff, thanks to Professor Dominique Rouzies. This was an amazing experience to get to know better the inside of our mothership and to start drafting what we could do together.
From these training sessions, several new ideas/programs came to life which could become game changers for us. It was also the time to strengthen our relationships with the HEC Alumni Association as well as HEC Paris academic staff.
We always advertise the fact that you need to mobilize your communities, and for some time, we might have missed the ones in front of us.
"Rediscover" the startups of the Spring 21 batch
🌻 Summer '21: 150 startups supported in parallel
At the beginning of last year, we did a review for our year 2020, to better appreciate the journey we went through only in a short amount of time. Only 6 months later, we already feel as if we did more in that first semester of 2021 than we did during the past year. Many of the programs on which we were working for the past few months are finally coming to fruition, and we are getting ready for the second half of the year to be even busier.
So now that we just welcomed our new batch of 20 startups last week, it's time to discover the startups of the Summer 2021 batch
We will Build the Future with You
🎥 Our New Place: HEC Records with Imagin'Office
We collaborated with Imagin'Office, an intrapreneur team from Icade's Urban Odyssey startup studio, to open a new place in Bastille.
This place is going to be a completely new concept for us: a constantly active content factory.
In there, you will find a fully equiped photo & video studio, a fully modular place for all your events, a podcast room to launch a web radio, and much more.
Get in touch with Lisa to create your event!
We have gathered entrepreneurs with expertise in content creation and the production industry, such as Popmii, Marram, Demooz, Archibien, Slice studio, and Studio Pipelettes to create unique content and give life to all your ideas.
One floor above us is one of our scale-ups, My Job Glasses, which will continue its mission to reveal youth vocations by connecting students and professionals.
Starting now, we will test numerous formats to educate, to interact with and to create new ambitious startups and projects. This is not a coincidence that the building is located in the «Roquette» district of Bastille, since our ambition is to propel startups from 0 to CAC 40.
Get in touch to create content and organize workshops with us!
🦸 Our New Program for Executives: Corporate Transformeurs
After supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs and dozens of intrapreneurs by connecting them with our communities, we are launching in October a program based on the same premices to support executives in transforming their organisation.
In the Corporate Transformeurs track, you will improve your ability to align stakeholders, to mobilize resources and to create new engines of growth, by interacting with startups, experts, and professors in a unique « à la carte » program.
Come onboard a team of 3 executives, for 3 months with at least 30 hours of engagement to start grabbing more opportunities, both with startups and the innovators inside your organisation.
Contact us to become a corporate transformeur by joining the first batch of October!
Current partnerships
🇰🇷 Korean Startup Center
After carrying out last year a first program with the Korean startups support agency, we had the chance this year to once again support a new batch of Korean startups through the Korean Startup Center.
After selecting 16 startups from Korea at the beginning of the year, we put them through two weeks of extensive feedback and advice from our community of experts, going through more than 150 one-on-one meetings, to ultimately select 8 of them to join us in France in September.
Those 8 startups are now in the process of planning their setting up in France, and last week, two of our experts, Mathias and Aymeric had the opportunity to spend the week in Korea with the Korean startups, alongside other incubators from all over the world, to help them prepare their strategy and KPIs for the coming months of the program.
Discover the startups selected for the Korean Startup Center Paris!
👩 Women Entrepreneurs 4 Good
WomenEntrepreneurs4Good is the new accelerator program for women entrepreneurs operated by the HEC Paris Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center, in partnership with the Women's Forum for the Economy & Society and Procter & Gamble.
This initiative aims to equip women entrepreneurs and minority women’s enterprises with unique resources and capabilities to innovate and grow businesses aligned with the European Green Deal strategy.
Discover the Women Entrepreneurs 4 Good program.
🏗️ Urban Odyssey
We have now been happily working with Icade, and their Urban Odyssey program, for a couple of years now.
Batch after batch, they have made their startup studio and its ambition evolve, and we have made our contribution to their incubation evolve with it.
We are now being ready to welcome the third batch of their studio, and we cannot wait to see what can of projects will emerge to better the future of our cities.
Come apply to the Urban Odyssey program!
Upcoming Partnerships
💊 Future4care
We are extremely excited to collaborate with Future4care, a joint venture between Sanofi, Orange, CapGemini and Generali, who have joined forces to create a unique open-innovation ecosystem in Europe to accelerate e-health.
Future4Care is both an accelerator for european healthcare startups and an Institute providing content on digital health and delivering reference certifications. At Incubateur HEC Paris, we thrive to impact society positively and are delighted to bring our expertise to help Future4care to create a positive and engaging ecosystem serving patients and the general population.
A 6,000+ square meter space just a few hundred meters from Station F will physically incarnate the accelerator and Institute for the future of healthcare. An associated digital platform will provide services to entrepreneurs on a global scale.
If you are a startup in the digital health field, and you want to test, improve and scale your solution, now is the moment!
🌽 Hectar
After the HEC startup launchpad collaboration with the 42 school, and after the Incubateur HEC Paris deciding to settle at station F, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to start working with the latest project from Xavier Niel: HECTAR ("HEC" is even already part of the name).
The Incubateur HEC Paris and HECTAR will join forces to create a new Agtech and Foodtech accelerator, within the biggest farming campus in the world.
If you want to better understand the topic, go watch Kiss the Ground, Demain or The Biggest Little Farm, to get inspiration of what could be achieved.
By finding sustainable solutions in the way we produce and eat foods we can have a tremendous positive impact on climate change and health while preserving our « savoir vivre ». Our goal is to help all people working in this sector, to improve working conditions and to bring new interest from younger generations in the fields as more than 100k farms are not going to find a buyer in the coming years.
The startup industry borrowed a lot of the vocabulary from agriculture, now it is time to give back to it.
🧪 Creative Destruction Lab
The Creative Destruction Lab is a nonprofit organization that delivers an objectives-based program for massively scalable, seed-stage, science- and technology-based companies.
After being launched at the University of Toronto, it has since then spread to 10 locations globally, all partnered with a local university, and of which HEC Paris is the latest!
Globally, the CDL is supporting startups along 16 different deeptech streams, such as AI, Quantum, or Space technology, and helping founders connect to a global community of mentors and investors to massively change the future of our planet.
If you know any companies that could be a good fit, share the application link with them!
We all know that diversity is key. It’s getting there that is the hard part…
That’s why we do our best to become a crossroad, a place where people from all origins and walks of life can gather and be united by the same sense of purpose and ambition in changing the world.
Let’s spread the world to all like-minded changemakers.