Top French engineering school Grenoble INP is a historical shareholder and platinum member of InnoEnergy. Yesterday, the Grenoble INP foundation inaugurated HOPE, its ninth Chair for industrial excellence, dedicated to fight energy poverty and which is under the wing of the French Ministry of ecology. InnoEnergy is a financier of the Hope Chair, also part of its strategic committee thanks to the involvement of Céline Jullien, our Industry Programme Management Officer.

What is the Hope Chair?

The Hope Chair was born from the common will of Grenoble INP and a lot of social and economic actors to gather means, experiences and needs to fight energy poverty, through a mix of innovation and social challenges.

“The primary ambition of this Chair is to reconcile economy and human, technology and society”. […] “Energy poverty is an economic and social reality that affects nearly 20% of French citizens” explains Régis Largillier, Hope’s incumbent. Régis has long been an evangelist and ambassador of the Smart City and Smart Energy approach. From that, he is convinced that a smart, sustainable and livable city can’t exist without taking into account the human and social aspects.

How to measure energy poverty and its impacts? Are there only individual solutions or can we build a new model? What will happen to energy-related jobs?

To answer these kinds of questions, the Chair will focus on four main objectives:

1. Experience: Transform field experiments into sustainable and marketable solutions.
2. Knowledge: Work on economic models, organisations, methods and tools to fight precarity.
3. Innovation: Stimulate innovation and the creation of solutions
4. Share, inform, connect with all the actors, associations, institutions involved in the fight against precarity

What is the Grenoble INP foundation?

Through sponsorships, the Grenoble INP foundation, a public institution for higher education and research, was created in 2010. Its goal is to support the influence of Grenoble INP, strengthen the link between Grenoble INP and businesses, contribute to the advancement of research and technology and to the development of educational, scientific and industrial innovations. Its activities are designed for the common benefit of all contributors and aligned with the Foundation’s three strategic pillars: citizenship, excellence, and international outreach.

InnoEnergy’s role:

The Hope Chair is a very good opportunity for us to invest in one of the major challenges of the energy transition in Europe. The Chair brings together key players in the field, united to make innovation one of the solutions of energy precarity. InnoEnergy has chosen to be a member of the strategic and steering committees, both to better understand the specificities of the domain, to share its vision and experience as an investor and accelerator of European innovations in the field of energy. We’ll also share our knowledge on one essential dimension of the energy transition — the individual and collective appropriations of innovations. Last, it is an opportunity for InnoEnergy to support Grenoble INP, which is one of its 6 French shareholders and platinium members.

Find all the financers here: