'We will have won when we are no longer seen as a committed school, because this commitment will have become the norm.'

Dear community,

The school year is over and gives way to a period of reflection. Reflecting on how future managers and leaders are trained, how our business models are conceived, and how our activities fit into their ecosystem.

This is what we invite you to do in this last newsletter before summer with the interview of Marie-Sarah Mailliard who, having realised that being aware of social and environmental issues did not automatically lead students to think differently from their elders, decided with Arthur Samuel to establish a higher education institution: Regen School.

Could you introduce yourself, your background, and what drove you to found Regen School?

I am the co-founder of Regen School. The other co-founder is Arthur Samuel, with whom I had already been working before the launch. Previously, I worked in infrastructure, particularly telecoms infrastructures, focusing on the deployment of digital technology in rural areas and assessing the impacts of these deployments. Later, at Tikehau Capital, Arthur and I were part of a task force exploring positive finance, innovating, and creating financial products more aligned with impact. Essentially, we sought to align investors, shareholders, and the companies needing economic transformation (from "brown" to "green" models) — but most equity financing is not well-suited for long-term transformation challenges due to investment durations. Within this task force, we also worked extensively on issues related to culture, human capital, and skills. Arthur and I trained in the field: he taught at ESSEC, and I at Sciences Po, and we were able to work with researchers and scientists. Then, after a year and a half, we had to train the rest of the team in these new practices.

How did you manage to train traditional teams?

It was at that moment that we realised the scope of the issue. We first thought that recruiting a team of young investors would help us evangelise traditional teams. But during recruitment, we noticed they were aware of impact issues but were not trained to think differently. Their profiles were similar to those of investors who graduated from top schools 10, 20, or 30 years earlier. We began looking closely at what schools, especially business schools, were doing to train their students on these issues. Around the same time, the Shift Project was working on its ClimatSup report on the evolution of competency frameworks in business schools. We worked with their teams, started a benchmark and led interviews with several hundred leaders to understand the missing skills. Our research aimed to understand the barriers preventing education from transforming: international rankings, the culture of prestigious schools rooted in the 19th century and the industrial revolution, and operational barriers.

We then explored what we could do with a B2B approach to help schools transform but faced heavy roadblocks (i.e. lack of interdisciplinarity, administrative red tape, low interest from most traditional schools to engage in-depth transformation of core teachings). Eventually, we concluded that new institutions had to emerge to overcome these divisions. Neither Arthur nor I came from the education sector, but we decided to establish a school, advocating for innovation, interdisciplinarity, academic excellence and bravery.

In recent months, we have heard a lot about the concept of regeneration. What is your own definition?

To me, regeneration has to be seen as strategic thinking about an organisation's economic model and how it collaborates with its stakeholders. Regenerative economy is an emerging economic thought closely linked to the concepts of contributive and positive economies. It involves moving from a linear resource extraction system (extraction, transformation, consumption, waste production) to a system that is not only circular but also contributes to restoring the ecosystem services necessary for our survival. This system includes traditional stakeholders (clients, suppliers, employees, etc.) as well as living organisms and ecosystem services, assessing its economic model and activities based on their impact on living organisms and integrating their restoration. Often, the best way to restore is to allow resources to regenerate naturally, which means producing less.

Regen School is a higher education institution, but it is not like other schools… So, what is it?

We are an independent higher education institution with a strong partnership strategy. We aim to be highly connected to the ecosystem and to work with numerous stakeholders, including businesses, other schools, research institutes, consulting firms, leaders, and think tanks.

Today, Regen School has two main activities. The primary activity is to train students in state-recognised and certified programmes: undergraduate and master's degrees. We have focused on master's programmes so that students can work part-time in companies and directly apply what they learn at Regen School. The other activity involves developing programmes for businesses, either on various topics for their employees or with a very systemic and holistic approach to different subjects: leadership, management, economic models, strategy, supply chain, etc. We are also setting up a third activity: sectoral programmes with shorter formats, bringing together leaders from a specific sector to discuss and learn about their sectoral issues, thus entering into a mode of transformation and solution.

Some of the people we train will work in impact or CSR teams, but the real victory will be when we are considered a conventional business school and when there is no need to emphasise our commitment because it will be the norm.

How do you teach regenerative economy?

We felt that the first things that needed to change compared with traditional teaching was interdisciplinarity and the ability to think on different scales. That’s why 25% of the courses are macro-level focused, to help students better understand the world, gain perspective and to show that situations result from historical context, not fixed physical realities. 

Then there are 50% of the classic business and management school courses, but which directly include reflections on impact, systems thinking and the limits of the planet in the practice of these professions. For instance, in marketing, instead of focusing on customer acquisition, we discuss raising awareness and creating brand robustness by conveying committed messages. These reflections help sustain activities, diversify them, and better integrate risk-management into business strategy and product design. 

The remaining 25% must be proven, embodied, tested, and help students learn about themselves. Innovating requires strong shoulders, and at Regen School, we support those who will be inventors and will have to convince their peers. Creativity is thus very transversal in teaching regenerative economy. The ability to be creative in business, to invent rather than replicate, is a skill hard to find in the job market. This is reinforced by shorter investment and strategic cycles: business plans once spanned 10 years, now it is closer to 5 years. This leaves little time for R&D and error, yet regenerative economy demands R&D, long-term investment and accepting that some projects may fail, as this is how innovation occurs.

How can business executives adopt a regenerative approach?

It is challenging for a company to be regenerative from A to Z because the current economic and political system does not naturally promote regenerative models. Leaders attempting this face a prisoner's dilemma: they cannot be the only ones trying. Each attempt is therefore necessarily imperfect. However, they can press on particular spots within the system where the impact potential is the highest for the most significant ripple effect. Many powerful ESG and CSR concepts and tools have been sidelined. If a business executive revisits these concepts and uses them as strategic levers instead of applying them to a traditional economic model, they are already adopting a regenerative approach. Business models should be robust in terms of the resources needed, governance, and social justice.

It seems that the concepts related to regeneration need to be tested to be understood, that theory and practice are intertwined. However, from the outside, it can be difficult to understand how conventional models can evolve towards regenerative models…

It's true that research and action are often opposed. For regeneration, the risk is appearing too theoretical, so I believe we must accept starting and taking action at some point. The regenerative approach is inherently interdisciplinary and syncretic. And actually, several theories of regenerative economy develop around tools, such as the FSSD framework developed in Sweden and represented in France by Caroline Gervais. Thinking in terms of tools helps grasp regenerative economy’s principles in investment or business development. Broad economic theory addresses planetary limits, but businesses struggle to make decisions based on water levels or pollinator numbers. Decision-making tools are needed to ask the right questions.

Taking a social or governance angle is often a good illustration. Choosing suppliers and clients based on ethical alignment, or educating them instead of parting ways, requires time and money, and sometimes shaping a new economic model. You have to reconnect with these issues to integrate in your business model your role in relation to the ecosystem service.

How can we ensure this paradigm outlasts its trendiness and deeply influences our economic models?

The first thing to celebrate is that the term "regeneration" is fantastic; it is very positive and has gained traction. If the term fades but the underlying concepts remain, it is not a problem. Additionally, beyond the trendy term, it is essential that case studies are documented and publicised to show that a regenerative model is feasible and to break away from clichés. In fact, the current economic climate is quite favourable: there's a kind of congruence between the regenerative economy and the search for a more regional, less globalised economy, Europe’s reindustrialisation, reinvestment in the long term and in R&D, the ability to rediscover economies of scale, and so on.

Regenerative models are a major productivity lever — but it is a cultural shift. So we have the duty to bring this thinking out of the microcosm that is already interested in ecology.