A look back at the Rennes SB Summit: an international event to co-construct high-level research and seek answers to today’s transition challenges
On 9 and 10 October 2023, Rennes School of Business organised the first Rennes SB Summit. This summit, initiated by the Centre for Unframed Thinking (CUT), brought together researchers and personalities from all over the world to address the challenges of sustainable transformation from an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral perspective.
Coming together to co-construct
With the major challenges of sustainable transformation as its main theme, the Rennes SB Summit aimed to bring together researchers, experts, entrepreneurs and managers from different fields to discuss topical issues and co-construct high-level research with real impact.
Climate change, capitalism, production models and artificial intelligence are just some of the main topics that were addressed during the series of conferences, master classes and plenaries.
Organised by the CUT (Centre for Unframed Thinking), which is the first Institute for Advanced Studies (IEA) in the world to be based in a business school, the Rennes SB Summit also aims to promote and encourage interdisciplinary research projects by bringing together ‘soft’ sciences such as the humanities and social sciences with ‘hard’ sciences such as climatology, technology, mathematics and environmental sciences.
From Princeton to Oxford to Nagoya, over renowned researchers and experts from all over the world took part in the discussions.
A highly successful first edition
This first edition of the Rennes SB Summit was a great success, with 576 people, including 350 students, attending the various plenary sessions and Masterclasses, which were open to everyone over the two days, as well as the workshops, which were reserved for researchers and experts.
The President of Brittany Regional Council, Loïg Chesnais-Girard, also took part in the summit, introducing the Masterclass “Sustainable transformation: is Brittany on the right track? on Monday evening with the President of Rennes School of Business, François Châtel. Other representatives from several influential groups and companies in the Brittany region, including the CCI d’Ille-et-Vilaine, MEDEF 35 and OFCE, also came to discuss this theme. Putting Brittany at the heart of this international event shows that, as well as being an international school, Rennes School of Business is also firmly rooted in its region.
The Rennes SB Summit was also an opportunity for the school to announce the launch of the new Triple Accounting Chair in partnership with Goodwill-management, a firm that helps companies combine economic performance and sustainable development and integrate them into their business models.
