Known as the Ecole Superieure de Commerce de Lyon until 1997, EMLYON is one of the oldest business schools in France, founded by the city’s business community in 1872.
Its main campus, in the suburb of Ecully, was purpose-built to celebrate the institution’s centenary in 1972. It has other French campuses at St Etienne and, since 2016, in Paris along with collaborative agreements with other universities in Lyon, Sciences-Po in Paris and the highly prestigious Ecole des Mines.
A Triple Crown-accredited institution, it places a strong emphasis on what it terms "Early Makers", favouring entrepreneurial students over aspirant corporate executives. The Entrepreneur Centre created in 1984 is reckoned to have incubated more than 1,400 start-up companies of which around 85 per cent survived for five years or more.
International activities have had a strong Chinese influence since the mid 1990s. A French-medium MBA in partnership with Jean Moulin University and Lingnan College, part of Sun-Yat Sen University, has run since 1997. A Shanghai office was opened in 2000, followed in 2007 by a campus at East China National University.
A newly-created Global DBA programme incorporating a doctoral thesis, run in partnership with Durham University, will include modules taught in Durham, Lyon and Shanghai.
A Morocco campus was opened in Casablanca in 2015, while a new four-year bachelor in business administration course is being offered at Bhubaneshwar in India as a joint enterprise with Xavier University.
At the same time as pursuing cutting edge modernity with its “Smarter Business School” partnership with IBM, EMLYON continues to reflect the deep-rooted epicurean heritage of its home city by hosting the annual Defi de Bacchus, claimed to be the largest wine-tasting competition in Europe.
