INSEAD unveils a 10-year campus re-imagination masterplan

INSEAD, The Business School for the World, unveiled a bold new vision for its Europe Campus, along with a 10-year long campus re-imagination masterplan.

Opened in 1967, INSEAD’s Europe Campus is renowned for its pioneering design of spaces for learning, collaboration, and bonding. Close to 60 years later, INSEAD’s phenomenal global expansion and renewed commitment to business as a force for good has led the school to embark on a masterplan encompassing twenty buildings to reimagine its first campus that reflects not only its present excellence, but also future ambitions. 

The new design brings fresh thinking to all the core elements of today’s management education: group collaboration, informal exchange, ubiquitous use of digital technologies, and intense classroom discussion and debate. Even as it leverages the power of modern technology, the primary focus will be on the enduring human experience, critically important in an increasingly digital era. The architecture gives preference to fostering human connection, reflection and exchanges that will spark new ideas and lifelong friendships.

INSEAD Dean Professor Ilian Mihov commented,

“Our mission is to bring together amazing people from around the world and to enable them to harness their diversity of cultures and ideas to transform business and society.  We need an architectural approach that is a match for the escalating global challenges confronting business leaders – today and tomorrow.”

The masterplan coherently brings together strategy, heritage, people, and the place. It aims to create a campus that supports INSEAD’s excellence in learning and research. The indoor and outdoor spaces of the state-of-the-art campus will have an even greater role in facilitating interaction, stimulating innovation, and supporting inclusion, projecting the original campus vision into the future.

The masterplan promotes human, as well as planetary wellbeing, establishing spaces which facilitate a vibrant intellectual environment. As a “Force for Good” institution, that will be judged on its contributions to fighting climate change, INSEAD’s Europe Campus development is environmentally and financially sustainable, leveraging and integrating the unique setting of the Fontainebleau Forest.

Susan Lloyd-Hurwitz, Chair of the Facilities Committee at INSEAD Board of Directors, said,

“The campus is just one part of INSEAD, but it is the very base and foundation that supports and enables our aim for excellence. We wanted to create a place where this highly diverse community can come together in harmony with each other and with nature, while stimulating amazing levels of creativity to serve the world. INSEAD has gone from bringing together Europe, to bringing together the world. It is exciting to see our original campus rethought to meet today’s global challenges.”

Attila Cselotei, Chief Operating Officer at INSEAD, said,

“We reimagine our physical campus to be a dynamic hub with primary focus on human experience and greater integration with nature. By creating a campus for good, INSEAD will again lead the way in redefining management education by responding to the new imperatives of people, place and planet.  The new campus is an important step in the school’s commitment of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.”  

Construction on the first new buildings is scheduled to start in July of 2023.