Rennes SB Summit

The first edition of the Rennes SB Summit took place on the 9 and 10 October 2023, with a focus on “Interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral perspectives on current transitions required for sustainable change”. With 64 speakers, 576 participants, including 350 students, and 25 and a half hours of debates, this was a groundbreaking event on several levels.

Through this event, Rennes School of Business demonstrates its commitment to promoting research and affirming its strategy of rethinking business management, freeing itself from social conventions and models, and thinking outside the box (Unframed Thinking). Its reflections and studies are particularly focused on areas of transition such as Agribusiness and AI at the service of companies.
The Rennes SB Summit is also a way for the school to nurture its network of researchers and bring together experts and stakeholder communities in a single venue.

Responding to a constantly changing society

Today’s society is constantly changing, and responding to these changes can be a real challenge. How can we finance these transitions? How can we innovate for the climate and transform production models? How can we rethink capitalism? These are just some of the questions that were central to the event, during which the school sought to promote exchange and innovation to find answers that can contribute to a better world.

Look back at the Rennes SB Summit 2023 in video:

Discover the programme in 2023

Rennes School of Business hosted its first annual Summit on the 9 & 10 October 2023, in the context of global and multidimensional transitions that are challenging certain prominent educational, managerial and economic frames. True to its motto, “Unframed Thinking”, Rennes School of Business has led and achieved significant reforms in its educational provision and research structure and programmes over the last three years to cope with these massive trends. The Summit in 2023 was a unique opportunity to show the extent of this rapid development to the School community and beyond.

The first Summit was devoted to Leading Sustainability Transformations. It was structured around three main axes to reflect some of the principles lately reinforced by the School.

• The first of these axes was broad interdisciplinarity: given the multidimensional nature of the ongoing transitions, interdisciplinary dialogues are becoming more urgent than ever. To this end, Rennes School of Business launched its Centre for Unframed Thinking (CUT) in March 2022, the world’s first business school-based Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), the first IAS in Brittany and a full member of the French IAS network since April 2023. On this occasion, CUT gathered some of the leading world researchers in ecology, robotics, environmental and agricultural sciences to exchange on topics of sustainability transformations with distinguished scholars in management, economics, finance, sociology, anthropology and law. Six plenary sessions (with two co-speakers for each) were devoted to these dialogues.
• The second axis was intersectionality: organising interactions between the academic and non-academic spheres. Six sponsored workshops took place during this first Summit to show the extent of collaboration between the School’s researchers and, notably, the corporate partners. The areas covered by these workshops intersected those of the School’s five Research Centres (AI in Business, Green Supply Chain, Agribusiness, Rethinking Tomorrow’s Organisation, and Financial Market & Corporate Outcomes).
• Last but not least, Openness to Society, another key feature of the School: two conferences were held at the end of each day of the Summit on key sustainable development issues in Brittany, fully open to public attendance and questions.

Professeur Raouf Boucekkine, General Director of CUT, Associate Dean for Research & Full Professor

• Des chercheurs internationaux se réunissent à Rennes pour un sommet sur les transitions [Ouest-France]
• Rennes SB Summit 2023 : retour sur un succès international [Studyrama Grandes Ecoles – Espace Prépas]
• 1ère édition du Rennes SB Summit : un Sommet international sur les transformations durables [Studyrama Grandes Ecoles – Commerce & Management]
• Rennes : La recherche interdisciplinaire pour anticiper l’avenir [The Good]

Ted Loch-Temzelides, from « Financing Transitions » plenary
Francesco Miglietta from « Innovating for the Climate » plenary
Mike Livermore from « AI for Good » plenary