Project presentation
Société à Mission Europe - FEDER
Building tomorrow's European business model in the Hauts-De-France region
The Société à Mission Europe project is a research-action project dedicated to analyzing the legal quality and uses of the société à mission. The result of collective work involving researchers, business leaders, social partners, senior civil servants and politicians, the French société à mission is a major legal innovation introduced by the 2019 Pacte law.
Fifteen years after the emergence of this thinking in France, and seven years after its inclusion in positive law, the Société à Mission Europe project aims to open up a new stage of research and experimentation.
While the dynamic of the société à mission is real, it still remains quantitatively limited: since 2019, approximately 2,390 companies have adopted this legal quality, a significant but still modest figure compared to the entire French economic fabric. This observation invites us to question not only the conditions of diffusion of the model, but also its concrete uses, its brakes and its transformative potential.
The aim is to extend the analysis, hitherto mainly national, to the scale of territories and Europe, in order to assess its concrete effects, identify its strengths and limitations, and explore the conditions for its dissemination and appropriation by economic and institutional players.
Designed as an "Act II" of the mission-driven company, the project aims to mobilize, on this new scale, academic, economic and political players around business models oriented by a raison d'être and social and environmental objectives.
The project is supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), one of the main instruments of the European Union's cohesion policy. The ERDF's mission is to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion by supporting innovation, research, ecological transition and territorial development.
Project duration: 3 years (2025-2028)
Planned productions:
- 14 scientific and operational productions
- 10 events
- 4 studies
- 4 books
- 3 white papers
- 2 cartographies
- 1 thesis
- Federating researchers and economic players around a research-action project on the company with a mission
- Making the Hauts-de-France region a laboratory for observing and experimenting with the mission-driven society
- To diagnose the French model of the mission-based company .
- Contribute to the emergence of a European network for reflection and practice on the mission-based company .
Research areas
The project is structured around three complementary axes:
Using the Hauts-de-France region as a privileged field of analysis, the program intends to make a wider contribution to reflection on "business differently" models, at the service of economic, social and environmental transitions.
