“Our ability to combine tradition and innovation is not a trend, but a constant" Sophie Mona Pagès (EDHEC 2013), Innovation Program Senior Manager – LVMH
(Expert voices 2/3): A series of interviews with professionals engaged in pedagogical challenges devised by EDHEC Business School. The experts share their professional expertise, explore the subject of the challenge and discuss their role in this learning exercise.
Sophie Mona Pagès (EDHEC 2013) is Innovation Program Senior Manager for the LVMH Group. Present during the EDHEC Open Innovation Challenge 2025*, she assists students in considering the case proposed by her company. In this interview, she shares details of her background and career, as well as her vision of innovation in the luxury sector.
Why are you taking part in the EDHEC Open Innovation Challenge?
At LVMH, I run the DARE intrapreneurship programme and had the chance to structure and develop the programme’s incubator. DARE is open to the Group’s 215,000 employees and enables transversal teams — comprising talented people from different entities — to combine their expertise to imagine new value-creating solutions for our 75 Maisons.
On a day-to-day basis, I’m keen to stimulate an exacting dynamic of innovation, closely related to the needs of our Maisons and the major transformations at play in our business lines. Exploring new levers of creativity, connecting the Group to external ecosystems, identifying soft signals liable to shape the luxury business of tomorrow: these are all things that drive what I do.
EDHEC’s Open Innovation Challenge fits perfectly with this approach. I’m taking part for the third consecutive year and am convinced of the benefits of the dialogue the Challenge creates between students and businesses. The agile and intensive format produces genuine collective intelligence of high strategic value. It directly feeds into the projects I support, while giving students a practical immersion in the sector’s innovation issues.
In addition to its operational aspects, the Challenge also harbours a particular personal interest for me. As an EDHEC graduate, the first time I took part three years ago coincided with the 10th anniversary of my graduation ceremony. Rediscovering the Croix-Roubaix campus at that time was a big moment for me and a milestone in my career. Since then, I’ve been glad to engage every year, to transmit a demanding culture of innovation culture grounded in reality to the School’s new generations, and to represent LVMH in an authentic and stimulating framework.
What did you do before joining LVMH and what prompted you to specialise in innovation?
Before even entering EDHEC, I had the chance to explore several creative universes — music, fashion, advertising — all of which were fields of expression that shaped my outlook on brands, culture and the emotions they arouse. These first experiences gave me the taste for the collective, the sense of detail and the desire to act with impact.
I joined LVMH in 2012 as an apprentice in audit and internal control with Parfums Christian Dior, before continuing with Make Up For Ever, where I got to set up the same function and work in it for three years. I then devoted five years to entrepreneurship outside the Group, by launching and supporting several start-ups — a foundational chapter in my subsequent career. And in 2022, I re-joined the Group in my current functions.
What drove me towards innovation was the natural convergence between creation, transformation and action. Entrepreneurship taught me to structure my intuition, to generate ideas amidst uncertainty and to think outside the box while keeping my feet on the ground. I developed the attitude of a builder: turned towards the solution, driven by the desire to move things forward, with the belief that every constraint can become a lever for creation.
Now, through the DARE programme, I’m eager to transmit this energy on a Group-wide scale. In my role, innovating means above all building a framework where talented people can dare to do, and excel themselves and bring meaningful projects to life.
What kind of methodologies and tools do you use to raise students’ awareness?
Innovation is always spawned and grounded in reality — reflecting a desire to respond precisely to a problem. In the EDHEC Open Innovation Challenge, I assist students in the strategic analysis of the brief they are given. This year, the task is to imagine the contours of a concierge service for Belmond, an emblematic luxury hospitality Maison belonging to the LVMH Group. My role is help them confront their ideas with the expectations of our most demanding customers, by encouraging them to adopt an approach that is both sensitive and rigorous.
I urge them to go out into the field, to immerse themselves in the Belmond universe and to really put themselves in the user’s shoes. The idea is not to come up with an appealing idea, but a relevant solution, grounded in the experience and the reality of the service concerned. This requires objectivity, curiosity and the ability to question their initial intuitions.
I also pay particular attention to the development of their soft skills: the art of asking the right questions, active listening and reading non-verbal signs. These skills are essential to understand precisely our customers’ expectations and emotions.
What kind of methodologies and tools do you use to raise students’ awareness?
Innovation is a fundamental lever that instils our Maisons over the long term, without ever betraying what makes them unique: it gives a contemporary resonance to their heritage. The issue involves creating a dialogue between technological disruptions and the timelessness inherent to our universe. It only makes sense to incorporate artificial intelligence, for example, if it exalts the human relationship that remains at the heart of the customer experience. This creative tension between heritage and modernity, between the requirement for transmission and the quest for renewal, is the natural breeding ground for excellence at LVMH.
Our ability to combine tradition and innovation is not a trend: it’s a constant. The founders of our Maisons always cultivated this ability with precision, allying mastery of the gesture with an intuitive understanding of the long term. In my eyes, luxury according to LVMH is exactly that: honouring heritage while opening the way to the future. A golden thread between transmission and creation that guides my engagement on an everyday basis.
*The EDHEC Open Innovation Challenge is an immersive learning exercise enabling Master 1 Business Management students to work in teams on real innovation problems, in collaboration with partner companies.
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