ESCP’s Impact Papers returns with a sixth volume: Artificial Intelligence for Impact: Creativity, Ethics and the Future of Business
After five editions exploring disruption, innovation, and societal change, ESCP’s Impact Papers returns with a sixth volume: Artificial Intelligence for Impact: Creativity, Ethics and the Future of Business. Published by the ESCP Research Institute of Management (ERIM), this year’s edition brings together 48 thought-provoking contributions from ESCP faculty and guest authors across disciplines and campuses to examine how AI is reshaping key dimensions of business and society.
Exploring AI’s transformative role
This edition comes at a moment when the transformative power of artificial intelligence is raising urgent questions for leaders, innovators, and policymakers alike. Contributions highlight the tension between efficiency and ethics, the opportunities for creativity and inclusion, and the risks of concentrating power in algorithmic systems.
- Leadership in the AI era: how traditional notions of authority are shifting as algorithms take on decision-making and management functions.
- Healthcare and drug innovation: how AI can accelerate drug launches and clinical trials while raising new regulatory and ethical challenges.
- Workforce transformation: why experience-based skills such as judgment, contextual awareness, and ethical reasoning are becoming more valuable as routine tasks are automated.
- Entrepreneurship and innovation: the ways in which startups and established firms are using AI to experiment with new models of value creation.
- Geopolitics and sustainability: the implications of AI for economic resilience, inclusivity, and global governance.
This edition highlights important issues that will need to be managed in the coming years and supports new approaches to overcome them. It involves adopting innovative and creative methods, behaviours and processes in response to global change.
Prof. Régis CoeurderoyAssociate Dean of Research
Dr. Sonia Ben SlimaneExecutive Director
ESCP Research Institute of Management (ERIM)
A strategic theme for ESCP
For Prof. Léon Laulusa, Dean and Executive President of ESCP, the theme reflects both a global urgency and ESCP’s mission of preparing responsible leaders for a changing world. He underlines the pivotal nature of this edition:
“AI is no longer a distant possibility, it is transforming our world at a breathtaking pace. Beyond the challenges lie extraordinary opportunities: to rethink creativity, to design more responsible forms of leadership, and to build organisations that are not only more efficient, but also more human.”
This aligns with ESCP’s broader strategy of placing responsible AI and technological innovation at the heart of its teaching, research, and institutional agenda. As Laulusa shares, “At its core, AI is a new language to master, one that our students, faculty, and leaders must learn so that they can shape the conversation rather than be shaped by it.”
Creativity and ethics at the core
Editors Prof. Régis Coeurderoy and Dr Sonia Ben Slimane were joined by guest editors Isabella Maggioni, Louis-David Benyayer, Marie Taillard, Sylvain Bureau, and Yi Yang. Together they shaped a volume that bridges research and practice, framing AI’s impact through the lens of the School’s LIGhTS research themes: leadership and inclusive management, innovation and entrepreneurship, geopolitics, human well-being, technology, and sustainability.
Through case studies, conceptual essays, and forward-looking analyses, the contributions show how businesses and societies can harness AI responsibly—balancing technological efficiency with ethical imperatives and creative human potential.
A distinctly European perspective
Reflecting ESCP’s pan-European identity, the Impact Papers bring together research and practice from across the School’s six campuses in Berlin, London, Madrid, Paris, Turin, and Warsaw. The volume emphasises the need for organisations to integrate technological literacy with ethical foresight, and to design business models that support not only performance but also responsibility and sustainability.
“Our professors, researchers, doctoral students and external participants have contributed their distinctive expertise and multidisciplinary competencies,” shares Laulusa. “Together, they offer complementary perspectives to anticipate and design strategies, practices, behaviours, pedagogies, and tools that can help address AI-related challenges.”
From insights to impact
Launched in 2020, the Impact Papers provide timely, research-based insights into global disruption and innovation. Each edition addresses a major societal issue, bridging academic perspectives with managerial practice and public debate.
Our commitment to our strategic plan drives us to ensure that research does more than analyse: it must inspire action. This collection embodies that mission, highlighting how AI can become a force for positive impact when guided by creativity, responsibility, sustainability and inclusion.
Prof. Léon LaulusaDean and Executive President of ESCP
Campuses