On April 16th, the official signing and launch event for the “NAOS Lab for Leadership” at HEC took place at La Maison HEC, in the presence of:
-Eloic Peyrache, Dean of HEC, Rodolphe Durand, HEC lecturer-researcher,
-Delphine Colson, HEC Foundation CEO,
-Romain Briat, Executive Director of the Lab, Brad Harris, Academic Director of the Lab
-Jean-Noel Thorel, founder of NAOS
-Alexandre Dhuiege, President of the Jean-Noel Thorel Foundation
-Helene Le Teno, director of the Jean-Noel Thorel Foundation and president of Heart Leadership University
This new project was built on a shared ambition: to enlighten, study and equip the leadership of tomorrow, to preserve our humanity in the 21st century and to better lead in a world of AI.
The Jean-Noel Thorel Foundation (founding member of HLU in 2021) is providing a multi-year structural donation of 4 million euros from 2026 to 2028, with the ambition of fostering, studying and equipping powerful, lucid and altruistic leadership, based on intuition, empathy, courage, critical awareness and discernment in the face of complexity and uncertainty.
This donation enabled the creation of the “NAOS Lab for Leadership” within HEC, which will deploy its activities on a triptych “Think Teach Act”: research on the future of leadership, new educational content for existing courses and creation of a certificate, dissemination of new practices and imaginaries of leadership in and outside the world of business schools.
To give this project its full power, we have also established a partnership between HEC and Heart Leadership University, a non-profit educational and scientific organization dedicated to the exchange of knowledge, content, and complementary and joint initiatives.
This partnership aims in particular to share and disseminate within the HEC universe (students, faculty, alumni, partners) the innovative reports, expertise, content and educational formats that have been produced and prototyped by HLU since its creation, with many leaders of French SMEs and mid-sized companies, and thus, to accelerate the evolution of the selection and training of tomorrow’s leaders.