Philippe Durance

About Philippe Durance

Doctor in management sciences, Philippe Durance is a professor at the Conservatoire national des Arts & Métiers. He holds the chair of ‘Foresight & Sustainable Development’ at CNAM and is a researcher at the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Research in Action Sciences (LIRSA). He is also the president of the Institute of Desirable Futures (IFs), a think tank dedicated to reinvention. The IFs aims to reintroduce long-term thinking into decision-making and to provide a space for controversy. He combines foresight reflections and experiments with the aim of sustainable development and around issues of general interest. His research mainly focuses on the discourses and practices of action; it mobilizes philosophy, history, and foresight to question the management of organizations and its representations, as well as the contradictions posed to collective action. This approach makes him particularly sensitive to the emergence of new trends, which he deciphers in some of his works on economics and sustainable development. His interventions with public and private organizations generally concern two main areas: foresight and innovation. In the field of foresight, he is one of the leading representatives of the French school of foresight and advocates a practice aimed at building decisions by placing humans at the center of strategic processes. In the field of innovation, he critiques the dominant model and highlights the value of emerging models, for both companies and territories (open innovation, participatory and collaborative innovation, social innovation, etc.). Alongside his research and teaching at CNAM, he regularly participates in several high-level training programs: Agro ParisTech, EHESS, Essec, HEC, INET, Paris Dauphine, Sciences Po Paris, Sciences Po Lille, etc. Philippe Durance recently published ‘Strategic Foresight in Action’ with Odile Jacob (February 2014)