EDHEC’s Sustainable Impact Challenge: Turning MBAs Into Sustainability Leaders

Stephanie Brooks spent 15 years in the U.S. recruitment industry. She’d climbed all the way up to executive partner at a San Francisco firm when she felt she’d reached the top of the ladder, so to speak. She wanted a pivot.

The Global MBA at EDHEC Business School checked all her boxes: Highly international with 30 or more countries represented in its small cohorts of 70 to 80 students. At 10 months, it’s one of the shortest, fully-accredited full-time programs on the market. It’s global not just in name but in design, opening career possibilities for Brooks that U.S. programs simply could not.

And, located in Nice — on France’s sunshine-soaked southern coast — it would be nearly impossible to beat the weather.

She couldn’t have known, however, just how consequential her decision to apply to EDHEC’s program would be. Within weeks of starting the program, during pitch day for the MBA Sustainable Impact Challenge, Brooks started work that would change the course of her career.

Brooks and three teammates ended up working with Louis DuPont, a French interim management firm providing experienced executives for transitional roles for its client companies and organizations. The company was looking for solutions to help its clients comply with a new French law mandating greater gender parity in companies with over 1,000 employees. The law stipulated that such companies must have at least 30% of senior executive and management committee positions held by women by 2026 and 40% by 2029.

“Recruitment in the U.S. is a super male-dominated industry, and women typically drop off at a certain level. I never had female leadership,” says Brooks, MBA Class of 2024.

“I was the only female partner at my company. To this day — almost 20 years later — I think that’s still the case, which is a problem. We all had personal reasons for wanting to work on this topic.”

SUSTAINABILITY AS A STRATEGIC PRIORITY

Years before sustainability became an MBA buzz word, EDHEC was a first mover. It was the first MBA program to integrate a sustainability learning expedition into the curriculum 15 years ago, back when current dean Emmanuel Métais was program director.

Under Métais’ leadership, EDHEC has intentionally integrated sustainability across all its programs, setting a focus on net positive business as one of three pillars of its strategic plan, Generations 2050. Today, EDHEC’s Global MBA has been ranked 4th worldwide for ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and Net Zero teaching by the Financial Times for four consecutive years.

Six years ago, MBA Program Director Sandra Richez wanted to go further. “We knew that we couldn’t graduate MBAs who didn’t understand the business side of sustainability, with all the new norms coming out and with everything that was happening in society. We needed to prepare graduates for what was coming.”

She pulled together a multidisciplinary team of faculty, administrators, alumni, and students to reinvent EDHEC’s MBA with sustainability at the core. It embedded sustainability topics in all of its courses, asking faculty to list which UN Sustainable Development Goals the course covered right on the syllabus. That also added more courses and, as the cherry on top, created the Sustainable Impact Challenge — a five-month project in which MBAs worked to solve real sustainability issues for real companies and organizations.

“How else could we prepare them for what was waiting for them in the business world?” Richez asks.

“At that time, most companies didn’t really know what they were doing when it came to sustainability. It was very empirical — you did what you could, stayed aware of new regulations, and followed the growing awareness around climate change.

“Today, it’s strange to think of sustainability as something emerging, but six years ago, it was just starting to gain traction, especially in business schools.”

INSIDE EDHEC’S SUSTAINABLE IMPACT CHALLENGE

In any respectable MBA program, students master the fine art of the pitch — whether it’s selling themselves, their business plans, or their startup ideas. But on an uncharacteristically cloudy day in mid-September, the roles were reversed. This time, it was the companies pitching themselves to the EDHEC MBAs.

It was pitch day for the Sustainable Impact Challenge. Fourteen companies presented their sustainability challenges to the Class of 2025, vying for the attention of enterprising MBA teams eager to tackle real-world problems.

There was Biohm, a UK startup making sustainable products from mushroom fibers. Mushrooms are biodegradable, fast-growing, and have a low carbon footprint. The potential environmental benefits are enormous — if the company can find the right products and markets. They wanted MBAs to help them scale up and break into new sectors.

Then there was IBM, a corporate giant pitching an AI-powered dashboard to streamline sustainability reporting — which is still a bit like the Wild West, with different rules, metrics, and calculations for different agencies. It is often tedious, time-consuming, and a clerical nightmare. At the same time, pressure is mounting for companies to get their data right. IBM challenged the students to work through the dashboard with one of its client companies, offering them hands-on experience with complex sustainability data while demonstrating to the client how its tool could ease the reporting burden.

And there was Searoutes, a next-generation supply chain platform designed to help organizations measure, manage, and reduce carbon emissions. They wanted a comprehensive marketing plan to raise product awareness.

MBAs ranked their project preferences, and EDHEC faculty assembled them into interdisciplinary teams of four or five. Each team got a professor specializing in their project field who, along with the companies, serve as mentors throughout the project.

“There’s a strong intercultural element to it, and that’s been really interesting. Different parts of the world approach sustainability very differently, and having such a diverse cohort ensures that students bring these perspectives to the projects they work on,” Richez says.

Students from Asia, Europe, and the U.S. can have very different perspectives on sustainability. Working together, they share best practices, learn from one another, and create solutions that are globally informed.

“It’s also about recognizing that no country is perfect. As Americans, we might think we’re falling short in some areas, but every country has its own challenges. For instance, people don’t often think of China as a leader in sustainability, but they’re doing amazing things in solar energy and circularity that many of us don’t even know about. This kind of peer-to-peer exchange, where students compare and contrast what’s happening in different regions, is incredibly rich. It brings new insights to their projects and provides a big boost for the sponsoring companies they’re working with,” Richez says.

Class of 2025 MBAs will work on their sustainability challenges for five months in total. They will incorporate their classroom lessons on topics such as sustainable business models, business ethics, the carbon economy, and more. They also got an AI bootcamp to power their research.

Then it will be their turn to pitch.

In February, EDHEC invites all the companies to the school for the final event and awards ceremony. MBAs will present their project reports to the companies themselves as well as a jury panel of sustainability professionals.

PROJECT IMPACT FOR STUDENTS AND COMPANIES

The challenge is built as a win-win: The companies get a group of talented MBAs offering a fresh perspective to a problem that needs solving. In fact, several companies who have provided challenges in the past are coming back with new challenges for a new team of MBAs.

The MBAs, in turn, get real-world experience on problems they will likely encounter in their careers. Many go on to secure internships or full-time positions with the companies they collaborate with. While building career connections isn’t the primary goal of the challenge, the projects provide invaluable networking opportunities and exposure to hiring managers within these organizations.

“Even if it’s not right as soon as they get out, you’ll see them later, as they move up in their careers, heading off into sustainability,” Richez says.

EDHEC’s MBA is also attracting more students with strong profiles in sustainability, further reinforcing its impact on career trajectories and the broader job market.

Take Hamid Rafieian, EDHEC MBA ‘24, of Tehran, Iran. He studied aerospace and worked as a mechanical engineer before transitioning to tech. Before coming to EDHEC, he co-founded a digital healthcare startup with his wife in 2013. It is now one of the most popular healthcare websites in Iran with nearly 10 million users.

For his Sustainable Impact Challenge, his team worked with IBM to develop a sustainability benchmarking system for major corporate clients like Mercedes, Stellantis, and Vodafone. The goal was to assess how sustainable these companies were and provide tools to track their progress.

“One challenge was that many companies engage in greenwashing – reporting sustainability measures that aren’t entirely accurate,” Rafieian says.

The team’s task was to create a method to benchmark and compare these companies fairly and efficiently, which meant navigating tens of thousands of pages of corporate reports using AI. IBM liked their work so much, it invited them to present their findings at its European headquarters in Paris.

The experience helped Rafieian recognize the broader scope of sustainability beyond just climate and environment. His research uncovered significant gaps in workplace gender inequality for employees over 45, particularly regarding menopause. That, in turn, sparked a business idea focused on empowering such women with AI-based tools and support systems.

He’s now working on that venture full time.

TURNING A CHALLENGE INTO A CAREER

The gender equity project from Louis DuPont wasn’t actually Brooks’ first choice when she sat through last year’s SIC pitch day. But, it turned out to be a perfect fit. Working so many years where she was often the only female executive in the room made the project personally relevant.

Brooks was assigned a team with three other women. One was from Chile with a background in government and education. Two others, both from Brazil, brought engineering and tech expertise.

“Our work ethics and personalities just clicked,” says Brooks.

In 2011, France passed the Copé-Zimmermann Law which mandated that women should occupy at least 40% of board seats in companies listed on the stock exchange or those with over 500 employees. And, while the country made significant progress in that sense, executive committees and leadership remained stubbornly male dominated.

So, in 2021, France passed the Rixain Law mandating that women must hold 40% senior management positions and executive seats in companies with over 1,000 employees by 2029. For its project, Louis DuPont wanted the EDHEC MBAs to analyze the parity problem, identify barriers, and recommend actionable steps companies could take to elevate more women.

Brooks and her teammates interviewed more than 40 senior executives and wrote a detailed report on achieving gender parity at the executive level. Louis DuPont published the report, sharing it widely with its clients, network, and even the government ministry responsible for the law. In turn, companies sought out Dupont to help them implement these strategies, and the firm both attracted and placed more women in senior roles. The project culminated with an event in Paris where stakeholders celebrated the tangible progress. This year, the company returned to EDHEC with a new challenge: addressing employment barriers for individuals over 50.

Since graduating from EDHEC, Brooks has stayed in Nice to launch Rendezvous Partners, a growth advisory startup aimed at helping tech companies scale while placing women in leadership roles. The venture also assists French startups in entering the U.S. market, providing them with the resources and connections needed for a smooth transition. It’s a venture that grew out of the work she started on her SIC.

“Parity and the gender gap are global issues, and it was something I tackled daily while working with executives in Silicon Valley. Questions like where, how, and what we can do to find more female talent — especially in STEM — are constant challenges. The problem starts at such a young age, with women dropping off the pipeline, parental leave issues, and a whole range of systemic barriers. Coming to France offered a completely different perspective. The laws and quotas here create a mandate for companies to address these issues, and that dynamic was eye-opening,” Brooks says.

“At the same time, there’s a gap — there aren’t many firms out there truly solving the problem. Some focus on female placement, but they don’t necessarily tackle executive or tech roles. That’s where I started to see the opportunity. Our sustainability project technically ended in February (2024), but we kept working on it in the background, and it all flowed naturally from there.”

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