Caroline Verzat is Associate Professor in SHO Department at ESCP Europe. She is an alumni of Ecole Normale Supérieure and ESSEC. She also holds a PhD in the sociology of Organizations (University Paris IX-Dauphine) and HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) in entrepreneurship. She started her career as a consultant in management and organization (Bossard Consultants, now Ernst and Young) and became Lecturer in Management at Ecole Centrale de Lille where she managed innovation projects of engineering students. In 2009 she joined Advancia, the first French school specialized in entrepreneurship and ESCP Europe in 2017. With Alain Fayolle, she is editor-in-chief of Entreprendre et Innover, the first French outreach journal between researchers and professionals in the field of Entrepreneurship and innovation. She is a member of FA2L, a spinoff of the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) which accompanies teacher teams wishing to develop active pedagogies and reinforce student engagement.
Her research focuses on action research, which closely combines practical exploration and theoretical research. Three main questions at the interface of sociology, management, educational sciences are at stake. The first one concerns the development of the entrepreneurial mindset throughout life: What is its nature? What are its benefits but also its limits at the individual and societal level? Can it be educated? The second question accompanies the ongoing transformation of educational environments: For what real purposes emanating from what latent values and beliefs? Through which educational innovations and at what level of the education system? How can their real impact be measured and to what extent is it related to context variables? What are the characteristics of an emancipating educational environment? The latter question focuses on student and teacher innovation teams and their coaching: What is the impact of leadership configurations and emotions on learning and performance? But also how to enable actors to cope with hidden facets of learning and innovation (failure, hangers-on, conflicts, delays)?