Fabrice Marque testimonial:

Spring 2013. Pierre Nanterme had recently taken the role of chairman of Accenture’s board, in addition to being our global CEO for 2 years. With him and some other managing directors, we were brainstorming about the different ways to reinforce our partnership with our School. Some of my colleagues were suggesting building on our past contributions at ESSEC in the field of social impact, such as PQPM. Some others were willing to push forward our joint projects around innovation and entrepreneurship. As the lead of the CRM & Customer Strategy practice – where the use of analytics and AI was deeply embedded in our offerings and projects – I was convinced that this initiative could be sustainable over time if we could transmit the ingredients of what was part of our successes. At that time, digital was already a strong transformation driver for many organizations, and we were confident that data would be one cornerstone of the coming changes.

As an outcome of this creativity exercise, we agreed that all those components – positive impact, data & AI, entrepreneurship – would need to be present in a new business and academic partnership we would fund. It led to the creation, with Nicolas Glady (then replaced by Jeroen) as the Chairholder, of the Accenture Chair in Strategic Business Analytics: the core of an ecosystem combining data and value creation initiatives, committed to train the next generation of leaders. Leaders able to understand the augmented intelligence data gives to an organization; leaders who will master how to develop new business strategies, leveraging the numerous applications of advanced analytics; leaders able to apply and deploy them in complex environments, at the right place and at the right pace, increasing performance and creating new opportunities for both Business and Society.

Several years later, together with Jeroen and Magali, with the support of Accenture talents and the contribution of numerous partnering companies, through yearly innovations, this is the promise of crafting an innovative and responsible leadership that our chair is committed to embody.