As with every year, it is THE main event for first year students on the Grande École Master. It is, of course, the Audencia Talents seminar to begin the academic year, which involves 530 students!

It took place between 15^th and 18^th September 2020. On the programme were 2 two-day sessions of brainstorming and creative workflows dealing with a CSR issue put forward by our partners in business. It was a dive into the deep end for our new students, giving them an immediate taste of the professional world, in an atmosphere of collective emulation.

For the 2020 edition, a theme was chosen, “Dare for Good”, with four watchwords: “CSR”, “responsibility”, “ecology” and “environment”. In all, no less than seven companies played the game: Sodexo France, GRDF, the Lactalis Group, the Pierre & Vacances – Center Parcs Group, the Mazars Group, the REALITES Group and, naturally, Audencia.

A hackathon was pulled off in style by our students who were able to demonstrate all their creativity and their commitment to CSR.

For the first time, all the students on the eight Audencia Specialised Masters^® courses tested themselves against each other on 4^th and 5^th January during the Together for Good Hackathon. For the occasion, GRDF, an event partner, invited the students to examine the question of raising awareness among the inhabitants of the Nantes urban area about sorting, collection and reclamation of biowaste in the form of biogas. As a result, over two days, fifty students pondered and imagined promising solutions for a circular economy involving the city’s inhabitants.

On completion of this work, the jury made up of the Nantes region urban planning agency AURAN (Agence d’Urbanisme de la Région Nantaise) and GRDF, in the presence of the biowaste action plan supervisor at the Nantes Métropole urban authorities, evaluated the solutions proposed. Three groups were rewarded for their efforts!

In addition, our students will be able to meet and discuss with players in sorting and collection of biowaste as part of a visit to a methanization site, which will be organised for the winners once the health situation permits.

Furthermore, the students’ entire output was added to the AURAN’s works in progress on characterisation of potential biowaste reserves in the urban area and analysis of the reclamation in the region, particularly via methanization biogas.

The Climate Collage is a collaborative serious game aimed at raising students’ awareness of climate change. On a giant piece of paper or via a digital collaborative tool, each team must arrange thirty to fifty cards progressively handed out by the gamemaster. Each card depicts a physical phenomenon illustrated by a drawing, an explanatory text and figures. The students must connect the cards to each other in a manner that sets out the causes and consequences of climate change as explained in the IPCC’s reports. The Climate Collage combines scientific data, artistic expression and triggering of emotions to favour a broader understanding of climate change. This co-construction approach particularly makes it possibly to precisely comprehend that the causes of climate change are many and systemic, that the environmental consequences of human activity are genuinely real and that the climate change which will deeply affect human society is a complex and global phenomenon that exceeds their capacities to manage it.

As part of the major projects, a group of students from the “Actor in Energy Transition” specialised master^® has worked on creating a calculator to measure the carbon impact of students’ digital behaviour, in both their academic pursuits and private lives. The objective is to make them more aware of the impact of such activities, which is often underestimated, and more importantly to encourage a change in practices, especially regarding replacement of computer equipment and smartphones, use of e-mails, storage of data and streaming. Concerning the technical aspects, the students worked with the school’s information systems division teams and Digital4Better. To imagine a communication campaign that will incite all the school’s students to use the calculator, the group drew up a questionnaire and gave pause for thought to 50 students from Audencia’s different specialised masters over two days within the scope of the “Together for Good” challenge. The calculator will be available at the start of the 2021 academic year in September for all students via the Tomorrow app that they use daily.