ICN Business School celebrates 10 years of the Artem Alliance

Art, technology and management partnership educates artists, engineers and businessmen

ICN Business School is celebrating the tenth anniversary of Artem, the pioneering partnership that combines the disciplines associated with art, technology and management. Founded by the prestigious group of Nancy Schools, ICN Business School, Ecole des Mines de Nancy (Graduate School of Engineering) and Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Art de Nancy (National School of Art), Artem has led ICN to develop and enrich its teaching resources and expand its students' educational horizons over the last decade by successfully blending its own management savoir faire with that of artists and engineers.

Three-way alliance
With Artem, ICN, along with its partner Schools, is training a new generation of managers. "Through a teaching methodology based on experimentation and project management, where all three Schools participate in combining different forms of knowledge, intelligence and creativity, ICN students learn through experiencing interdisciplinarity" said Jérôme Caby, Director General of ICN Business School. "This equips them with the confidence to tackle complex problems and so facilitates their insertion into the professional world, since their skills match the real concerns of companies.  The contribution of ICN, as a founding partner in the Artem project, is multi-faceted, but perhaps its main contribution lies in its close links with businesses and the professions, which in turn provide openings for Artem students' talents." 

Academic innovation
Increasingly, the success of a project in the 21st century depends on a triangle of skills: "design, manufacturing, and management". Career profiles for executives today also demand multiple skill-sets for new types of jobs that incorporate art, technology and management.

Artem combines the integration of new technology in enterprise, creation of new professions at the meeting point of technology, art, and management, as well as development of more sensitive and elegant aesthetic tastes and a better understanding of the creative process.

It is this cross-disciplinary culture that allows Artem students to create over 200 projects each year, involving 3000 hours of group tuition in 400 expert sessions, including 20 workshops dedicated to complex problem solving.

"Artem Nancy is a great opportunity for students who will become managers in the global arena," said Jean-Claude Rouers, CEO of Clarion France and President of the ICN Board of Directors. "Artem gives our students a multi-field education, which makes the  difference when they apply for jobs. It will also allow companies to plan more multi-skill careers for their employees."

New joint campus
The next stage of the Artem Alliance will be to bring the three Schools together in a single, original and multidisciplinary campus in the centre of Nancy. With over 65,000m² of space on a 10 hectare site, the Molitor Campus will provide an international environment for almost 5,000 people (3,500 students and 1,400 professors, researchers, administrative and technical support staff). A research laboratory will also be set up in collaboration with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). While preserving their individual identities, the three Schools will continue to function interactively and offer students opportunities to build bridges between their respective disciplines.

"Coming together on the same campus will enrich the possibilities of exchanges and increase the collaboration between the three Schools", Jérôme Caby added. "They will operate more interactively and offer many opportunities for combining academic disciplines and opening up parts of the curriculum to other student profiles. Beyond the current phase of shared courses, joint projects and student work groups made up of artists, engineers and managers, a number of exciting possibilities are being planned, not least of which is the design of joint and interdisciplinary degree programmes."

About ICN Business School
Created in 1905 by the University of Nancy and the Meurthe-et-Moselle Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Institut Commercial de Nancy became ICN Business School in 2002. Since 2007, ICN is Equis-accredited and is among France's leading business schools. It is ranked, for example, fifth in the Financial Times ranking for the career progress of its graduates. Situated on two campuses, in Metz and Nancy, ICN welcomes more than 2000 students, among whom 280 each year are international. The ICN Group has 63 permanent professors, 27 visiting professors, 420 company consultants and more than 8000 alumni. More than 100 international university partners play an invaluable role by providing exciting challenges and opportunities for study and professional experience abroad. www.icn-groupe.fr