Improbable Chair by Galeries Lafayette Art Thinking
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The Improbable Chair by Galeries Lafayette is all about bringing together artists and entrepreneurs, linking art with business in a new way.
It supports creative practices by connecting artists with entrepreneurs, businesses with cultural institutions, and artistic creation with business strategy. It encourages everyone to embrace the "improbable" to think like creators. Through a unique method called "Art Thinking," developed at ESCP, the Galeries Lafayette group and ESCP offer a way to support, encourage, and spread the act of creation.
A few words from
Guillaume Houzé
Brand and Communications Director, Galeries Lafayette group
“The Improbable Chair is all about bringing together artists and entrepreneurs, linking art with business in a new way. It supports creative practices by connecting artists with entrepreneurs, businesses with cultural institutions, and artistic creation with business strategy. It encourages everyone to embrace the ‘improbable’ to think like creators. Through a unique method called ‘Art Thinking’, developed at ESCP, the Galeries Lafayette group and ESCP offer a way to support, encourage, and spread the act of creation.”
Guillaume Houzé, Brand and Communications Director, Galeries Lafayette group Photo Credit: ©Lucasziwel
A few words from
Sylvain Bureau
Professor at ESCP Business School
Scientific Director of the Improbable Chair
“Our initial belief was simple: to make creation accessible to as many people as possible. To achieve this, we developed a method called Art Thinking, which characterises how artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists go through similar steps in the creative process, such as gift-giving, deviating, destroying and drifting. For 15 years, our Art-Thinking seminars have trained thousands of students, entrepreneurs, managers, and researchers across a dozen countries and twenty universities and schools. Partnering with Galeries Lafayette group, a company with a strong entrepreneurial DNA, our chair combines theory and practice to amplify this approach and promote creators and creation in the broadest sense.”
Professor Sylvain Bureau, Scientific Director of the Improbable Chair
Objectives
The Chair has two major complementary goals:
- Support scientific research to better understand creative practices
- Teach the Art Thinking method and spread the Improbable pedagogy worldwide
Art Thinking not only helps participants unleash their innate creative potential; it also promotes collaboration, listening, leadership, negotiation, and constructive dialogue. Participants learn to question themselves, leverage failure, establish partnerships, and develop an agile approach to uncertainty.
Three areas of activity
- Scientific publications
- Doctoral theses and final dissertations
- Improbable Siesta: seminar bringing together researchers, artists, and experts in creation
- Spreading the Improbable method at ESCP and beyond
- Designing initial training in Art Thinking
- Training Art Thinking instructors
- Conferences and workshops on Art Thinking
- Exhibitions and Improbable openings
- Improbable residencies (artist/scientist/entrepreneur triads)
“This Chair is the story of an encounter between visionary creators who understood early on how future generations of students and entrepreneurs would need artistic and creative practices to prepare for the world of tomorrow. Through this collaboration, ESCP is grateful to the Galeries Lafayette group for opening up new playgrounds for unprecedented and improbable creations!”
Pascale Pernet, Director of chairs and corporate sponsorship
ppernet@escp.eu
Focus on...

Article
On Tuesday, 19th March 2024, Léon Laulusa, Dean and Executive President of ESCP, Jean-Stéphane Arcis, President of the ESCP Foundation, Philippe Houzé, Chairman of the Management Board of the Galeries Lafayette group, and Guillaume Houzé, Brand and Communications Director, Galeries Lafayette group, signed the first Chair dedicated to artistic and entrepreneurial creation.
Conference Proceedings
2018
Overcoming bifurcation bias and achieving family firm longevity: 700 years of Frescobaldi.
in 2018 Theories of Family Enterprise Conference, Centre for Entrepreneurship & Family Enterprise, University of Alberta, 2018, Edmonton, Canada
Chapter
2018
Pantouflage
in The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality: Understanding Social and Cultural Complexity., Alena Ledeneva Ed., UCL Press, chap. Volume 2, entry 6.18, 2018
Chapter
2018
Participant-led video diaries
in Unconventional Methodology in Organization and Management Research., A. Bryman and D.A. Buchanan (Eds.) Ed., Oxford University Press, pp. 190-210, 2018
Paper presented in a Conference
2018
Peer-to-peer evaluations as narcissistic devices: problematizing “communities” drawn from online platforms’ accountability relationships
in 12th Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Accounting Conference, 2018, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Journal Article
2018
Performing a strategy's world: How redesigning customers made relationship banking possible
LONG RANGE PLANNING, 2018, vol. 51 (3), pp. 480-484
Journal Article
2018
Permanent Liminality in Flexible Consumer Lifestyles
ADVANCES IN CONSUMER RESEARCH, 2018, vol. 46, pp. 214-219
Paper presented in a Conference
2018
Platformization of the shopping experience: Field research and modelling”
in Colloquium on European Research in Retailing, 2018, Guildford, United Kingdom
Journal Article
2018
Predicting GPs engagement with artificial intelligence
BRITISH JOURNAL OF HEALTHCARE MANAGEMENT, 2018, vol. 2018 Vol 24 No 3, no. Innovation in Healthcare, pp. 132-138
Journal Article
2018
Prediction and control: An agent-based simulation of search processes in the entrepreneurial problem space
STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP JOURNAL, 2018, vol. 12(2), pp. pp. 237-260
Journal Article
2018
Present and future of Supply Chain and Operations Management: Special Issue from the 5th P&OM World Conference
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHYSICAL DISTRIBUTION AND LOGISTICS MANAGEMENT, 2018, vol. 48(10), pp. 974-975