Set up by Aurore Haas (strategy and knowledge management lecturer at the SKEMA Innovation Academy), who chaired the proceedings from Paris, together with Nabila Boukef and Stéphanie Chasserio in Lille, and Laurence Descos and Lapo Mola in Sophia, the Knowledge Management Sprint brought together a number of lecturers from SKEMA and participants from some well-known organisations (McKinsey & Company, Schneider Electric, Olympic Games, etc.). The students became aware of and experimented with the founding principles of knowledge management (creation, management, exchange, utilisation, communities, digital knowledge management tools, etc.).
The students were split into multi-campus teams of five, six or seven and competed in a real-life practical challenge, building from the three sites a knowledge management team for a leading international industrial company. Three finalists presented their work to a professional jury. Team 78 (Lille-Sophia) won the "sprint" thanks to their ideas for a virtual meeting room and a dedicated knowledge management app. Through this seminar, participants became familiar with a manager’s role in this sector and learned to collaborate within a virtual international team, with the help of Microsoft Office 365 knowledge management tools.
The Design Thinking Seminar invites all second-year students and second-year MSc students to embrace a creative process that encourages out-of-the-box thinking and helps develop a sense of critical analysis. This is the challenge of the three days of this seminar, to be held simultaneously over the six SKEMA campuses on 23, 24 and 25 January. This “prototype 3” seminar will apply the methodology to itself and will adapt to students’ needs and behaviours. Design thinking is a creative approach that aims to satisfy needs – latent or expressed – by calling upon one of the essential so-called soft skills: empathy.
The seminar, whose theme this year is wellbeing in the smart city 4.0, aims to develop, usually among multicultural teams, the fundamental knowledge required to carry out ethnographic surveys, as well as a capacity for decision-making, and to make the proposal materialise in the form of a prototype in order to test the method more effectively. The work will be enhanced by round-table discussions to be held with various experts. As in previous years, the teaching staff, led by Geneviève Poulingue, look forward to observing once again that our students are capable of making highly creative contributions that may even become entrepreneurial projects one day.