Beyond Net Zero: EDHEC Launches Center For Net Positive Business

EDHEC Business School of France last week (April 25) launched its Centre for Net Positive Business (CNPB) at the ChangeNOW summit in Paris.

The idea for the center was first laid out in the school’s 2024–2028 strategic plan Generations 2050 unveiled last summer. As part of that plan, the school committed €21 million over four years to bring the center to life, blending research, future-thinking strategies, and real-world projects into the classroom.

Its goal is simple yet ambitious: Help companies give more to society and the environment than they take.

“In the face of accelerating environmental, economic and social crises, approaches focused on minimising damage are proving insufficient,” says Dean Emmanuel Métais. “While remaining profitable, companies must actively contribute to regenerating their environment.”

The center is led by professor René Rohrbeck – the Foresight, Innovation and Transformation Chair Director at EDHEC – and is meant to be a space where ideas turn into real solutions. Students will be central to that process.

TEACHING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE NET POSITIVE

The idea of being “net positive” comes from Paul Polman and Andrew Winston, authors of Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take. Instead of just doing less harm, net positive companies go a step further, helping restore the environment, support social fairness, and create value that benefits not only shareholders, but also employees, customers, and communities.

In 2023, Thinkers50 ranked the co-authors No. 3 on their biannual award list, considered to be the Oscars for the most revolutionary of management ideas.

EDHEC’s new center translates these ideas into curriculum, tools, and tangible case studies. Students will learn not only from faculty research but from real-world examples. The center’s Future FITness Index already includes more than 50 case studies from companies working to embed sustainability into their core strategies. It also features a self-assessment tool to help businesses evaluate their impact and trajectory, resources that will be shared in EDHEC courses.

CHANGING MINDSETS

The center builds on work already happening at EDHEC through its Foresight, Innovation and Transformation (FIT) Chair, which helps companies think ahead and plan backward from the future to tackle big-picture challenges. Now, that research is shifting into specific industries such as construction and nutrition through what the center calls “Sustainable Pathways.”

Instead of using a one-size-fits-all approach, the center will adjust its tools to fit each sector’s unique problems. Students will get hands-on with these tools and learn how to connect long-term goals with the decisions businesses make today.

The goal is to help businesses make better decisions by showing how their actions perform now and what kind of impact they’ll have down the line, making sure short-term moves support long-term goals, the school said.

While things like supply chains and technical issues can slow companies down, EDHEC leaders say the real challenge is changing how people think. “There is another slowing factor that needs to be taken into account: organisational inertia or even resistance,” the school said.

Making the shift to net positive business isn’t just about tools, it’s about changing mindsets and building the right skills to make those ideas part of everyday decisions and leadership.

To help with that, the center will roll out new courses to teach students how to think long-term, understand systems, and manage change. These classes will become part of EDHEC’s existing programs for both students and professionals.

STARTUP PIPELINE 

The center also plans to team up with EDHEC’s Centre for Responsible Entrepreneurship (CRE), which leads all of the school’s entrepreneurship efforts. Together, they want to help students and founders build net positive businesses right from the start.

They’re launching two major programs:

• The Net Positive Factory: This is a startup track that kicks off with idea-focused boot camps and leads into an incubation program at Station F, the world’s largest startup campus. It’ll act as a real-time lab to study and share how net positive startups come to life.
• The Impact Track: This brings together students, researchers, companies, and public institutions to tackle big challenges in specific sectors and come up with innovative solutions together.

“We must teach our students that while a company’s goal is to create profit, it also needs to have a positive impact on the world. This is something we strongly believe in, something the younger generation cares deeply about, and something companies now realize they must address,” Métais told P&Q in an interview last fall.

“This is what we call stakeholder capitalism. We have to teach our students that the main goal of a company is to not only serve its shareholders, but to serve all of its stakeholders at large.”

DON’T MISS: EDHEC’S GLOBAL MBA: WHERE SUSTAINABILITY MEETS ENTREPRENEURSHIP and P&Q INTERVIEW: EDHEC DEAN EMMANUEL MÉTAIS ON ‘NET-POSITIVE’ BUSINESS