ESCP Business School Names Thomas Jeanjean Executive President & Dean

Incoming ESCP Dean Thomas Jeanjean: “I am committed to building on the momentum achieved in recent years, guided by one simple conviction: the greatest ambitions only truly matter when they are translated into concrete achievements”

ESCP Business School has a new leader. The French B-school’s Board of Directors has appointed Professor Thomas Jeanjean as executive president and dean, tapping a veteran of French higher education to steer the school through the next phase of its growth. Jeanjean succeeds Professor Léon Laulusa effective August 24.

The appointment caps an international search led by the Board of Directors following the announcement of Laulusa’s departure in May, and it comes at a moment when ESCP – like business schools across Europe – is contending with fast-moving technological change, geopolitical volatility, and stiffer international competition for students and faculty. The board says it wants to build on ESCP’s recent momentum and cement its standing among the world’s top management education institutions.

A SCHOOL ALREADY ON THE RISE

Jeanjean inherits a school with real wind at its back. Poets&Quants named ESCP its 2025 Business School of the Year, citing the pioneering multicampus model, the push into technology and sustainable entrepreneurship, and an ambitious vision for the future. The honor came just months after ESCP unveiled Bold & United, the strategic plan that reorganizes the school into a new European University of Management, with the ESCP School of Technology and School of Governance eventually joining the business school as sister institutions.

Laulusa, the outgoing dean, has described the plan in audacious terms – casting the technology school as a “French MIT” and the governance school as Europe’s answer to Harvard’s Kennedy School. Under that plan, ESCP aims to grow its business school enrollment by roughly 1,000 students by 2030 while adding about 1,000 technology students and 300 governance students, backed by a €320 million campus investment. That expansion – along with hitting a top-five spot in the Financial Times’ European Business School ranking – now falls to Jeanjean to execute.

A CAREER BUILT ACROSS FRANCE’S TOP SCHOOLS

Jeanjean arrives at ESCP with more than two decades of experience. Since 2021, he has served as Deputy Chief Executive Officer for Education at the Paris Île-de-France Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCI Paris Île-de-France), where he directs education strategy across a network of 14 schools covering management, engineering, design, culinary arts, and technology.

Before that, Jeanjean held senior leadership roles at ESSEC Business School, including Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Dean of Post-Experience Programmes and Executive Education – a post in which he ran major strategic, organizational, and international transformation efforts. His academic path runs through École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay, where he trained, followed by the agrégation in Economics and Management and a PhD from Université Paris Dauphine. He started his academic career as a professor of accounting at HEC Paris before moving to ESSEC.

A MANDATE TO EXECUTE ON ‘BOLD & UNITED’

At ESCP, Jeanjean inherits responsibility for advancing the school’s Bold & United strategic roadmap, the five-year plan designed to position ESCP as Europe’s leading university for management. His mandate includes strengthening the school’s research output, launching two new units – a School of Technology and a School of Governance – and expanding the reach of ESCP’s six-campus model, which spans Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin, and Warsaw.

Philippe Houzé, chairman of ESCP’s Board of Directors, says the hire is a vote of confidence in Jeanjean’s ability to turn strategy into results.

“By appointing Thomas Jeanjean, the Board of Directors has entrusted the future of ESCP to a leader who combines strategic vision, a collaborative mindset and a proven ability to deliver,” Houzé says in a news release. “I am convinced that he will build on the momentum achieved by the school and lead the next stage of its development with a clear ambition: to establish ESCP as Europe’s leading university, recognized worldwide for the excellence of its research, the innovation of its teaching, the strength of its multicampus model and its ability to educate responsible leaders equipped to address the challenges of our time.

“The launch of the School of Technology, followed by the School of Governance, will mark a major milestone in this journey, enabling ESCP to continue anticipating the profound transformations shaping our world and preparing the leaders of tomorrow.”

JEANJEAN: ‘THE GREATEST AMBITIONS ONLY TRULY MATTER WHEN THEY ARE TRANSLATED INTO CONCRETE ACHIEVEMENTS’

For his part, Jeanjean says he’s approaching the role with a bias toward delivery over rhetoric.

“I am deeply honoured by the trust the Board of Directors has placed in me,” he says in a news release accompanying the announcement. “Joining ESCP is an immense privilege. With more than two centuries of history, the school has built a truly distinctive model, combining academic excellence, international openness and a deeply European identity.

“I am committed to building on the momentum achieved in recent years, guided by one simple conviction: the greatest ambitions only truly matter when they are translated into concrete achievements. Together with our faculty, professional staff, students, alumni and partners, I will devote all my energy to advancing this shared ambition, with one constant priority: providing our students with the very best environment in which to learn, innovate and prepare to make a lasting impact in a rapidly changing world.”

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