According to Vincenzo Vinzi, ESSEC’s Dean, future-fit leaders need certain competencies, but they must also be engaged and committed to prepare a world that is more prosperous and resilient than before.

This future-fit focus not only inspired the evolution of ESSEC’s programme portfolio, it also saw the creation of four institutes through their strategic plan, Transcend.

Vincenzo says: “Academic departments, of course, they are disciplinary, and they need to deep dive into different skills, knowledge and competences in different disciplines, but we wanted to create transversal institutes that allow students and graduates to take on the grand challenges of our time.

“These issues, these grand teams of our society serve as a catalyst to transform our pedagogy, our research and how we interact with companies and organisations.”

To address these, ESSEC created four institutes – the Institute for Geopolitics & Business; the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation; the Metalab Institute for AI, Data & Society; and the Together Institute for Sustainability & Social Change.

This model is reshaping how the French institution teaches – ensuring graduates are prepared to navigate how the world transforms with agility, ethics and purpose.

Vinzi tells QS Insights: “By 2028 we are committed to leading a future-fit business education that promotes progress.

“Opening the world by going beyond physical and intangible borders, preconceived notions, and biases. Surpassing ourselves, focused on the future while staying true to the humanist and open values that have always defined us.”

Why collaboration - not just curriculum - builds future-fit capacity

ESSEC’s institutes combined work offers a practical lens on how cross-industry collaboration can make graduates future-fit.

Industries don’t work in silos, and neither should education. Collaboration must be structural in how students learn, experiment and measure success.

It isn’t limited to internships or guest lectures - it functions as a living laboratory, bringing together business, technology, sustainability, entrepreneurship and ethics to test solutions in real time.

ESSEC’s institutes connect students with partners from engineering schools, start-ups, NGOs, creative institutions and even military units - each offering a different perspective on leadership under uncertainty.

Collaboration with external partners plays three roles: co-designing learning (chairs, guilds, and joint programmes) so students practice on live questions with real constraints; testing ideas in the wild (field projects, hackathons, apprenticeships, incubators) where iteration, failure and trade-offs are part of the brief; feeding evidence back into the system through metrics that track behaviour change, not only attendance.

This combination matters because the problems graduates will face - climate transition, AI governance, supply-chain geopolitics - are braided together. No single discipline, or single sector, can provide a complete playbook.

Sustainability & social change: systems thinking with external accountability

At ESSEC’s Together Institute, the team describes their approach to prepare students to be future-fit leaders as “rethinking economic and managerial models to align with ecological and social transitions, combining innovation, ethics and resilience.”

Their collaborations with businesses, NGOs and civil society mean students aren’t just studying sustainability -they are co-creating real solutions through chairs such as Ecological Transition, Social Innovation and Global Circular Economy.

ESSEC measures its effectiveness through both student choices and confidence. “We see strong student outcomes: 30% of MiM students choose to specialise in sustainability, and more than 60% tell us they feel prepared to tackle sustainability challenges in their jobs,” the team tells QS Insights.

Research follows the same trajectory. As they note, “a third of our faculty publications align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, showing that our research efforts are moving in the same direction as our teaching.”

Learning also happens through exposure to diverse expertise. “Regular events - from Sustainability Guilds to ESSEC Transition Talks - bring students into dialogue with leading external experts.” That influence now extends well beyond campus walls. “Our experts’ visibility has grown, with more than 240 media articles citing ESSEC on sustainability topics,” adds the team.

Ultimately, the environment students learn in is as important as the content they study. As the team concludes, “campus initiatives in circular economy, biodiversity and community engagement ensure that students learn in an environment that reflects the values we teach.”

Entrepreneurship & innovation: building the muscle to act under uncertainty

If sustainability frames why change is needed, entrepreneurship develops the capacity to make change happen.

“To be future-fit is to be entrepreneurial, i.e. to act with agility, creativity, and responsibility in uncertainty,” says Nicolas Landrin, Executive Director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

“Entrepreneurship is by nature transdisciplinary. It’s where management, technology, sustainability, and design meet to solve real-world problems. Not in theory but in practice. It's "Learning by doing" for real!” adds Landrin.

To measure the impact of entrepreneurial learning, ESSEC tracks universal exposure, venture enablement and throughput.

These indicators prioritise action and trajectory: are students trying things, shipping things, and later using those skills inside larger systems to move the needle?

“Beyond numbers, our impact is measured through the capacity of our alumni to drive change in organisations, launch ventures and lead transformations. Many students change gear to join big companies and bring their ability to get things done under uncertainty and drive change, Landrin tells QS Insights.

“Entrepreneurs are change-makers: they don’t just think about solutions; they build them. Our mission is to develop individuals who act responsibly, dare to create, and have an impact on society.

“In this sense, entrepreneurship is not an option: it’s the most powerful lever to form the leaders of tomorrow, capable of transforming uncertainty into opportunity.”

AI, data & society: technical fluency with human judgement

In the AI era, future-fit also means being AI-native without becoming AI-naïve.

Guillaume Chevillon, Academic Director of the Metalab, puts it this way: “We aim to train a generation of leaders that are tech-savvy yet able to find their sense of direction in the constantly changing AI environment.

“For this we provide a thorough understanding of the scientific underpinnings of Machine learning (ML) and AI while keeping a social science perspective where interactions with humans make predictions difficult.”

Cross-industry collaboration is designed into Metalab’s operating system.

Corporate chairs connect research to managerial use-cases, whereas creative alliances with the Arts School of Cergy bring artists in residence to co-produce AI-enabled works, shown in galleries and festivals - broadening students’ sense of AI’s human impact.

Scholarly communities like the Metalab Guild of AI (70 faculty and PhDs) connects management scholars, computer scientists and corporate R&D, while ecosystem programmes with CentraleSupélec develop AI-native managers via the BSc AIDAMS and Master DSBA, where sustainable tech, regulation, sovereignty and entrepreneurship sit alongside ML modelling.

The institute’s measurement strategy mixes breadth with signal through baseline capability; pathways to work; student-led reflection (like the IDEAS thinktank, edited by students, interrogates technology’s societal effects) and research esteem (Thinkers50 Radar recognition (Cristina Alaimo) for Data Rules (MIT Press), for example).

Together these point to a key proposition: prepare every student to use, question and govern AI, then attach that literacy to live organisational problems - productivity, adoption, risk, creativity.

Geopolitics & business: situational awareness and leadership under pressure

From the viewpoint of ESSEC's Institute for Geopolitics & Business, future-fit means "geopolitics-proof business leaders."

Aurélien Colson, Academic Co-Director of the Institute for Geopolitics & Business tells QS Insights: “Business cannot be separated from its (geo)political environment, which is why leaders need to understand power dynamics, geopolitical risks and regional strategies to make informed decisions and sustain competitive advantage.

“Foresight and resilience become key assets. Our purpose is to help students navigate this complexity with analytical rigor, proven tools and global awareness.”

Collaborative learning takes on many forms here. For example, through the Centre for Geopolitics, Defence & Leadership, students interact with officers from elite military units - including the nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle - to examine leadership under time and resource constraints.

“Students learn in a very interactive way key leadership values which we deem necessary for upcoming challenges: the sense of collective performance, the need to avoid overconfidence, or the capacity to solve problems under time and resource constraints,” adds Colson.

Similarly, the Institute for Geopolitics & Business and the Together Institute collaborate on climate & energy issues on climate-energy issues: “Cutting the consumption of oil & gas energy serves two objectives at the same time,” the team notes, demonstrating that geopolitical literacy isn’t separate from sustainability.

The indicators that best capture the Institute for Geopolitics & Business influence beyond the classroom is output.

Colson tells QS Insights: “Last academic year, our team published 3 major books; we organised 20+ conferences across our three campuses, bringing to life our “Tricontinental Dialogue”. Over 3,000 students and participants were exposed to the challenges of “post-globalization” through reflections connecting business leaders and public decision-makers. We recorded more than 300 media appearances where our professors and experts shared their insights - notably with the launch of our first "Barometer for Geopolitics & Business". 350+ MiM students are currently enrolled in our specialized tracks, with focus on International Relations, Defense, or European Affairs.

The takeaway for educators and employers

How do you know the ecosystem works?

If the goal is future-fit, the unit of analysis is no longer the classroom but the ecosystem.

From the ESSEC case, three design principles emerged:

Make collaboration structural, not episodic: build permanent bridges through chairs, guilds and joint degrees; measure behaviour change, not seat time: track choices, self-efficacy and venture impact; blend breadth with depth: give all students baseline literacy in sustainability, entrepreneurship and AI, then pathways to apply it.

Preparing students for the future means co-creating it with those already shaping it - industry, policymakers, communities, artists, engineers and the students themselves. Cross-industry collaboration must be built into pedagogy in the race for relevance.