INSEEC Business School


The INSEEC Business School is a Grande Ecole and French Business School, renamed INSEEC School of Business and Economics since 2019, with French, European and international campuses in Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Chambéry, London, Monaco, Geneva and Shanghai as well as San Francisco.
INSEEC Business School is the flagship School of the INSEEC Group.
Founded in 1975 by José Soubiran in Bordeaux, INSEEC grew gradually by acquiring other Business and Engineering Schools in France and abroad.
INSEEC is a private Business School and not a consular Business School, the latter being founded and directly dependent to a local French Chamber of Commerce.
INSEEC grew at a fast pace, and especially internationally, underpinned by Career Education Corporation until October 24th 2013 . From a local School founded and based in Bordeaux, it has developed tiers with the American Education System via its Franco-American Business School: the MBA Institute - American BBA INSEEC Campus in Paris, which prepares French and International Students for a prestigious MBA in the USA, enabling them to obtain at the end a diploma recognised both in Europe and in the USA. Strong bounds have been created with several prestigious American Universities such as: Emory, Indiana University or San Francisco State University allowing students to dive into American Campuses.
It is a member of the Conférence des grandes écoles since 2009, the rough equivalent of the Ivy League in France.
A Grande Ecole, literally "Great School" is a Higher Education Institution part of a French league of elite Universities, which has been created by Napoléon in the early Nineteenth century and which core-rule is to select students via national competitive entrance examinations to safeguard meritocracy and impartiality. French National competitive entrance examinations are organised in pools of examinations. INSEEC belongs to the BCE pool.
INSEEC has also been bestowed the following accreditations: UGEI, AMBA, EFMD, VISA, DD-RS, CEF DG, and is a member of AACSB.
Another specific feature of the Grande Ecole INSEEC Business School, it has the second highest rate in France of Admissions Parallèles, literary: Parallel Admissions.
Parallel Admissions are French students being admitted in a given Grande Ecole depending on their final score at national selective examination, in the run-up of obtaining their Undergraduate Degree or a Bachelor Degree. French students who don't stem from the Parallel Admissions régime, are students who passed the national selective examination right after two-years of intensive preparations to the Concours.
Those intensive preparatory classes called in French: Classes Préparatoires, often abbreviated as Prépa', select the best performers who passed their French A-level. If there are rankings of Engineering and Business Grande Ecoles, there are also rankings of Classes Préparatoires too. Those intensive preparatory classes are held by French high schools, although they are considered a post-A-level and thus higher education curriculum.

History and Values

The INSEEC U. Group proposes a Grande Ecole curriculum in General Management with elective classes available as part of the Grande Ecole Programme and starting from the first year of the Grande Ecole Master's Degree. For more specialised and non-Grande Ecole curricula, INSEEC provides Master's Degrees and MBAs in Wine and Spirits, Digital Media, Real Estate, Health Management, Luxury Management, Sports, Engineering, Journalism and Political Sciences. This incremental strategy has been possible via the numerous acquisitions of the group since its establishment in 1975.
INSEEC's values, like most other French Grande Ecoles, revolve around the humanism of the French Enlightenment era and the School of Thought of French Humanism.
However INSEEC goes even further, by including in its curriculum a compulsory "humanist internship", as part of which students have to carry out a work placement in a charity or an association.
As such, compulsory courses, conferences, events and on-campus activities are organised to instil those humanist values, but also to foster general culture, as well as to facilitate the teaching of history, geopolitics and sociology.
Debates and rhetoric competitions are organised on-campus, but also inter-campus, where INSEEC can compete against other Schools of the INSEEC U. group, along with courses in eloquence given at INSEEC's campuses. Debate is also relayed by on-campus associations such as IN'Debate, the Students' Association for Debate on the INSEEC Business School Campus in Lyon. Those Eloquence Competitions are under the aegis of the INSEEC U. Eloquence Academy.
Eloquence is prominently featured at INSEEC via classes of Conférence de Méthodes, a course originating and archetypical of the prestigious Paris Institute of Political Studies's pedagogic style.
Along those lines, as part of the main final examinations at INSEEC, a Viva Voce, in French: Grand Oral must be taken in order to complete graduation, during which every students will randomly be attributed a subject to present and defend in front of a jury. Many Grandes Ecoles use Grande Oral as part of their selective examinations or final examinations. They can also be called Viva Voce of General Culture.
INSEEC proposes a one-week intensive military training with a prestigious partner military school: the ENSOA, to instil values of respect, team-spirit, tenacity and discipline, but also the ability to react better in crisis situations.

Campuses and Schools

The INSEEC Group is based in:
The INSEEC Group brings together:
Schools in the domain of Communication and Digital Media:
but also other sister Business and Engineering Schools:
The INSEEC Group welcomed 22,000 students in 2017 ; 8,000 managers and employees in continuing education; more than 80,000 alumni; 370 permanent professors and 150 researchers/professors. There are 4 campuses in France, 5 campuses abroad and more than 340 international academic partners, with a global annual budget of €220M in 2017.

Prestigious National and International Agreements

INSEEC has woven a dense network of international agreements, some of which of prestigious renown. The criteria of internationalisation often pulls the school up in the rankings, owing to its excellence. For example in 2016, INSEEC was the fourth Grande Ecole in France with the highest number of students studying abroad.
There are 183 partner-Universities in 41 countries and 300 international students hosted throughout the INSEEC U. campuses every year.
In total, the whole INSEEC U. Group gathers 515 international academic agreements.

Campus life

Similarly to many French Grande Ecoles, INSEEC Business School hosts more than 30 students' associations on-campus which spans a wide array of missions: charity, gourmet food, wine, sports, arts, digital media, debate, video games, to cite a few.
The students' association landscape in most French Grande Ecole revolves around three major associations: BDE, BDS, BDA following a one-year rotation via elections. Any students on-campus can vote to elect a team led by a President and Vice-President for each BDE, BDS and BDA. The BDE is in charge of organising students' life in general, for example: students' well-being on-campus, discounts at local restaurants or shops around the school, students' night life. The BDS and BDA embody a similar role but will organise activities regarding their own core-values and mantra: Sports for the BDS and Arts for the BDA.

Notable Alumni

According to Who'sWho France, the following Alumni studied at INSEEC Business School:
There are around 40,000 INSEEC Alumni registered on LinkedIn, and 100,000 according to the ADI.
INSEEC was in September 2016 the 6th French Grande Ecole with the largest alumni network on LinkedIn.

Research

With originally two main research laboratories: one in Paris and one in Bordeaux, INSEEC has 5 research centres since it became the INSEEC School of Business & Economics.