EDHEC celebrates 15 years of pedagogical challenges

Each year since 2011, close to 1,300 pre Master students and Master 1 students on the Business Management track take part in two high-profile events organised on the School’s Lille campus, namely the EDHEC Open Innovation and néGO! Challenges, the latter focusing on negotiating techniques. Devised in collaboration with the School’s corporate partners, experts and professors, these seminars allow students to work on concrete cases proposed by the participating companies, and in direct relation with professionals. 

EDHEC Open Innovation: learning about innovation processes

During the EDHEC Open Innovation challenge, Master 1 students are initiated into the principles of open innovation. This discipline is used within organisations to explore and test ideas and internal and external expertise, in order to respond to certain issues, such as upgrading product visibility, improving the customer experience or attracting new customers. The seminar aims not just to identify an idea that responds to a need, but to yield a solution, through the co creation of a prototype with the participating company. “For the last 15 years, EDHEC Open Innovation has been generating a lot more than ideas: it has been revealing talents, encouraging thinking outside the box and bringing students and companies together around concrete cases”, explains Pierre-Jean Barlatier, Professor of Strategy and Innovation at EDHEC Business School and pedagogical lead for the competition. “Through successive editions, this challenge has been uniting the academic and business worlds in a joint process that is geared to imagining, testing and capitalising on tomorrow’s opportunities”.

In this respect, students are invited to conduct consumer surveys out in the field, to analyse other industries and to appropriate methods of working used in companies - such as design thinking or lean start-up methodology – in order to factor in the needs of users when developing products or services. During this process, professionals assist the participants with the resolution of their case studies, share their knowledge and expertise, and provide feedback.

néGO!: learning to negotiate with professionals  

The néGO! Challenge offers pre Master students a first immersion in business negotiation, based on concrete cases that are devised and assessed by the School’s corporate partners. In 2026, 60 negotiation specialists from over 27 companies shared their knowledge and expertise with the students, in order to help them prepare their arguments. And to develop their negotiating techniques, the participants also benefited from a preparatory phase with specialist negotiation consultants Negos Consulting.

Familiarising students with a range of expertise

At EDHEC, pedagogical challenges are constructed with several stakeholders. Juliette Gadaud, Director of the pre-Master programme, talks about the different actors involved in the néGO! Challenge: “Negos Consulting provides students with technical negotiating expertise, by familiarising them with proven methods and tools used in real professional situations. As for the School’s corporate partners, they offer concrete cases that immerse students in the reality of the professional world, while also fostering exchanges between the academic and professional spheres. Lastly, facilitators, who are often EDHEC alumni, support, coach and de-brief the students throughout the seminar, so as to maximise their output”.

When learning comes out of the classroom

These challenges are devised as skills-development laboratories and also offer students a way of learning outside the traditional classroom framework, as Juliette Gadaud explains: “If we’d opted for a classical negotiating class, we would have essentially covered the methodological aspect of the subject. But negotiation can only be fully learnt through experience and it needs to be tested and proven before it can really be assimilated. That’s why for the last 15 years we’ve been using a seminar based on concrete business cases to train students in negotiation issues and practices. Thanks to these real situations, students develop various skills like negotiating techniques, structuring their ideas, and preparing their negotiating arguments. The methodological approach is therefore rounded out with a concrete one, based on case studies tested and proven out in the field”.