What should business hold on to when everything else is changing? ESCP publishes the 7th edition of its Impact Papers

Artificial intelligence can now perform work that until recently required years of training. Companies are reconsidering where they produce, as supply chains become entangled with geopolitics. New medicines can be designed for a single patient, even as the economics of healthcare struggle to accommodate them. And the low-carbon transition is forcing governments and businesses to revisit assumptions about growth, competitiveness and responsibility.

These developments are usually discussed separately. The seventh edition of the ESCP Impact Papers considers what they mean for the decisions organisations are making today.

Published by the ESCP Research Institute of Management (ERIM), this year's edition brings together 54 Impact Papers under the theme Business, Society and Human Values: Leadership, Responsibility and Decision-Making in Times of Technological and Geopolitical Change. The contributions span ESCP's six LIGHTS research pillars — Leadership, Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Geopolitics, Humanities, Technology and Sustainability — and draw on research from across the School's disciplines and campuses.

Artificial intelligence runs through much of the edition. Several contributions focus on what happens as it becomes embedded in everyday organisational practice.

Louis Declee and Ghislain Deslandes ask what organisations risk losing when cognitive work is progressively delegated to machines. Their argument advances an idea that firms need to preserve the practices through which people learn to exercise judgement. If AI replaces apprenticeship, deliberation and the experience of working through difficult problems, an organisation may become more efficient while weakening its own capacity to produce and renew knowledge.

The changing relationship between companies and states forms another thread through the edition. Ziqiao Wang and Marc Oberhauser examine companies controlling critical technological infrastructure, including semiconductors, cloud access and software, as governments increasingly use these systems to exert geopolitical pressure. Companies such as Nvidia, ASML and TSMC can become part of the machinery through which geopolitical policy is implemented, while retaining important choices over the timing, scope and sequencing of that implementation.

Some of the edition's most striking questions arise when technological possibilities collide with institutions designed for a different reality.

Nicolas Roby and Frédéric Jallat examine N-of-1 therapies: medicines designed for a single person's genetic mutation. Such treatments can now be developed in months. Yet drug development, venture capital, insurance and reimbursement all assume that a medicine will ultimately have a market. What happens when that market consists of one person? Individualised treatments that have already been developed relied on philanthropic funding. The paper asks what kind of financing model could make this medicine available beyond a handful of exceptional cases.

Impact Papers were created to bring academic thinking into closer contact with the questions facing business and society. Seven editions on, they remain a space in which researchers can bring evidence, ideas and different disciplinary perspectives to debates still taking shape.

The questions in this year's edition do not lend themselves to a single prescription. They ask how organisations can use AI without losing capabilities they still need; how companies should operate when economic dependencies become geopolitical ones;