Research Interest

Topics

Biography

Sylvain Bureau, who holds a Ph.D. in management science from the Ecole Polytechnique, is an Assistant Professor in the Information and Operations Management Department of ESCP Europe.  

He is the co-director of the entrepreneurship major of ESCP Europe and chair of the RFID European Lab, and specializes in company creation, innovation, and new technologies. He has set up many masters and executive education courses with Professor Jacqueline Fendt. In 2007 he launched a company creation seminar open to students in engineering (Centrale Paris) and design (Strate Collège Design). He is familiar with teaching in engineering schools, as he has been giving lectures at Ecole Polytechnique since 2003.

His research focuses on entrepreneurship and information systems management. In entrepreneurship, his studies are centred around three core questions: (1) How do start-ups learn? (2) How should entrepreneurship education programs be designed?  (3) How can entrepreneurship in the informal economy be characterized and understood? In information systems management, he works on the diffusion of RFID solutions and the emergence of the Internet of things, with particular focus on the issues of adoption, assimilation and appropriation of these new technologies.

Beyond his teaching and research activities, he is also involved in opening up French higher education establishments (Grandes Ecoles) to social diversity. He is involved in three programmes at ESCP Europe (Cordées de la Réussite, Double Ascension, and Collège Paris Factory).

Current research

“Theory is when we know everything and that nothing works. Practice is when everything works and no one knows why. When theory and practice are united, nothing works...and no one knows why!”

This quotation from A. Einstein sums up the difficulty of carrying out research, in management or other fields. Sylvain Bureau tries to overcome this contradiction by basing his research methods on a strong interaction between the empirical and theoretical spheres to tackle two fields: entrepreneurship and new technologies.

Entrepreneurship:

1. Entrepreneurship and teaching: Having set up various courses on this topic at ESCP Europe, and following a training course at the Harvard Business School with other entrepreneurship specialists and members of the EFER network, several research papers and experiments were initiated.
2. Entrepreneurship and the informal economy: This project developed in collaboration with Professor Jacqueline Fendt aims to study entrepreneurs in the informal economy, in order to better understand the logics at play within this economy and the links with formal entrepreneurship.
3. Entrepreneurship and learning: The objective of this project is to explore the learning processes of high-tech start-ups. This research led by a team of reasearchers from Ecole Polytechnique, HEC and ESCP Europe seeks to characterize the trajectories of start-ups using a longitudinal qualitative method.

RFID, the Internet of things: what are the stakes for companies and society?

To develop research on this theme and encourage relations with companies and debates with civil society, Sylvain Bureau set up a new laboratory in 2009: the RFID European Lab, the leading laboratory on business and managerial issues related to RFID and the Internet of Things in Europe. This unit is composed of researchers with diverse competencies (computer science, logistics, entrepreneurship…) and from very different backgrounds (France, Germany, China, India, United-States). Collaborative work is in process with several laboratories, including the internationally renowned WinMec laboratory at UCLA.

Publications