Sarah El Haïry, Secretary of State to the Minister of National Education, Youth and Sports, in charge of Youth and Commitment, received the students who had won the challenge and presented the jury's "Coup de cœur" prize.

Julien Smadja, Deputy Managing Director in charge of digital TV activities and member of Groupe M6's management committee, presented the collective intelligence award.

Christophe Prior, Digital Transformation Office Leader at Airbus Helicopters, presented the Innovation Award, and Fabienne Masson, Advanced Project Manager at Valeo Comfort and Driving Assistance, presented the Open Innovation Award.

KEGDE has been organizing the Open Innovation Challenge for the past 7 years. The 2021 edition, organized in a 100% distance learning format, brought together 64 corporate missions for over 350 students from all specialized programs, MS and MSc in Marseille, Bordeaux and Paris. Divided into 85 transdisciplinary and transgenerational groups, they were accompanied by 33 coaches. They had four weeks to bring to market an invention submitted by one of the 64 graduate or partner companies taking part in the challenge.

This year, 50% of assignments were from KEDGE alumni.

Testimony of Sylvie Jouanard, Founder of TeenLabs
Ihad the pleasure of taking part with my company TeenLabs in Kedge's Challenge Open Innovation Entreprise 2021. The theme of the month-long immersion program was the strategic development of our young platform. In other words, in a start-up environment, how to identify, prioritize and address growth drivers. A team of international students worked on this topic and came up with relevant, innovative and inspiring proposals. It's a real asset for us to benefit from their efforts, and I believe they too have benefited from our collaboration in real-life conditions.It's also a source of pride to see these young people awarded this year's Collective Intelligence Prize!

Description of the winning innovation group/project

This ^7th edition of the challenge was marked by excellence, with the average performance of our teams rated by all the companies at 16.25/20.

On the podium for the first open innovation prize, here are the winners by site:

Marseille site :

The Airbus Helicopter Mission, which focused on re-engineering and diversifying the company's business through innovation, in response to the unprecedented crisis affecting the aeronautics sector.

The students (Louise Treguer, Maud Guyot, Reina Ezzeddine, Nicolas Boutemer) were brilliant. Christophe Prior, CTO at Airbus, commented: " You've lived up to the standards of our consultants, who are paid over €1,000 a day. You've clearly understood our company's DNA, and we're interested in your value propositions. I invite you to present your results to the Airbus management committee".

Bordeaux site :

The INRIA Bordeaux Sud-Ouest Center proposed a project for its startup U-Ride, based on a delivery pooling platform designed for restaurants and small businesses wishing to take control of their own delivery processes and make their delivery times more profitable. The team of students (Nicolas Denis, Ruochen Lin, Clémence Marque, Xuewei Peng) was passionate about the project, and invested a great deal of time and effort in meeting the company's expectations. For Sara Fernandez Calleja Operational Research Engineer and Johan Leveque Phd "An exceptional piece of consultancy work of a level rarely matched even by professional consultants. The value of this work with this team of 4 could be between 50 and 100 thousand euros."

Paris site :

Strategy and innovation consultancy EMERSTRAT has proposed a mission in the "Business Coaching" market in France. For Laurent Beduneau Wang CEO, lecturer at HEC Paris and founder of the SLP Paris gas pedal, "The value proposition and recommendations exceeded expectations! "A welcome return for the team composed of Justine Cappello, Harmonie Grob, Rayan Hanafi, Cédrick Martin and Elisa Rainaud.

For the "Coup de Cœur" award, the Minister presented the prize to the team that worked on the theme of "One young person, one solution"."The team was made up of Clémence Barbou Des Places, Yasmine Fellah, Maelis Jamain, Antoine Morin and Chloé Rebierre Rose. According to Thibault Romatet, Advisor to the High Commissioner for Employment, "I was delighted with the work carried out by the students, who brought a welcome touch of freshness to our reflections on the 1jeune1solution platform. Their reports include a pertinent analysis of the ecosystem, very pragmatic suggestions on how the site should operate, and some very good ideas for new modules to be developed."

According to Claude Spano, Director of Innovation at Kedge, "This feedback from the market is very positive.riential pedagogy, our students have developed the ability to solve complex problems using collective intelligence and open innovation."