Fostering entrepreneurship

Sciences Po has maintained close ties with business and at least 80 % of our graduates go on to work in the private sector. The aim of the Centre for Entrepreneurship is to encourage more students to pursue entrepreneurial careers. They do this by raising students’ awareness of business creation very early on in their studies and helping those interested in starting a business to develop and implement their project.

Entrepreneurship and technological innovation are an important part of the education we offer at Sciences Po :

• Entrepreneurship: whether or not they plan to launch a startup, all our students are expected to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. We define this as inventiveness, curiosity, agility, perseverance, pedagogy, and boldness. Recruiters—including large organisations—are increasingly on the lookout for this set of soft skills, making them key assets in today’s labour market.
• Technological innovation: advances in artificial intelligence raise challenges directly related to Sciences Po’s areas of study, particularly sociology, ethics, macroeconomics, and public policy. It is therefore crucial that our students take ownership of AI-related subjects, and no longer consider them the exclusive domain of engineering or business specialists.

The Centre for Entrepreneurship leverages and contributes to the wealth of the Sciences Po community. Young project leaders can draw on an active network of faculty members and partner companies to make their initiative a success.

As a training course, it is designed to allow all students to develop their entrepreneurial project, regardless of the Master’s programme in which they are enrolled. The course is also open to students on internship or who have recently graduated from Sciences Po.

“The curiosity, argumentation skills, understanding of societal phenomena, and intellectual agility central to Sciences Po’s educational approach are key skills that give Sciences Po students and graduates an edge in entrepreneurial ventures. All the more so today, when entrepreneurship is no longer determined solely by technological advances but also by a clear understanding of how individuals use these new technologies.”
Maxime Marzin, director of the Centre for Entrepreneurship

Teaching and learning

The Centre for Entrepreneurship offers Sciences Po students—whatever their level or programme—lectures, study trips, and a wide range of courses, from introductory to advanced. 20 courses and workshops are taught each semester by instructors from the business and innovation community, and are attended by more than 350 students. The themes range from an introduction to entrepreneurship to design thinking, the pitch, business plans, and coding.

Business incubation

More than 100 innovative startups have already benefited from an incubation period at Sciences Po. Our entrepreneurs benefit from a complete support offer, including access to premises, legal and accounting support, a Business Angels fund, training workshops, bimonthly peer-to-peer learning meetings, inspirational after-work sessions, and a mentoring programme.

Action research

The Sciences Po Centre for Entrepreneurship supports research on topics related to the study of business and innovation as socio-economic and political phenomena. This research is carried out in collaboration with researchers from Sciences Po laboratories including the Medialab, LIEPP or the Centre for the Sociology of Organisations. Topics include the place of women in business today, the balance between digital regulation and freedom of business innovation, social biases in business success, and startup governance in relation to the financial markets. These action-research projects are intended for swift application in the field and aim to inform the thinking of public and private decision-makers.