Our students speak: Rémy Soubirane, student in the MGPIE (“Management of Innovative Projects & Entrepreneurship”) Advanced Master® program

Available online : Wednesday 25 November 2020

The “Management of Innovative Projects & Entrepreneurship” Advanced Master® is designed to simultaneously develop an innovative mind and an intrapreneurial/entrepreneurial spirit while acquiring expertise in managing technological projects. We interviewed Rémy Soubirane, who talked to us about his entrepreneurship project.

Rémy Soubirane MGPIE — Rémy Soubirane, étudiant du Mastère MGPIE à l’ISAE-SUPAERO

Could you introduce yourself?

I’m 23 years old and a graduate of the ENSEIRB-MATMECA engineering school in Bordeaux, where I majored in electronics, with a specialization in Embedded Systems. Before that I had studied at a prep school in Lyon, Les Lazaristes, in the PSI section (Physics and Engineering Sciences).{{}}

Why did you choose the MGPIE program at ISAE-SUPAERO?

I always have enjoyed having my own little personal projects, and I have always secretly envied startuppers who dare to set out in an entrepreneurial adventure. I thought a lot about this during the lockdown, so I talked with a childhood friend, and we decided to go for it. We sent in our application to a call for projects at an incubator in the Rhône-Alpes-Auvergne region, and we were selected from among some twenty other projects. At the same time, I wanted to continue my studies and diversify my skills, and I had heard of the Advanced Master® program. I was drawing up a list of everything that was out there when I came across MGPIE. With our selection for the incubator, I thought I needed to be 100% in the adventure, which is why I chose this Master program.

Tell us about your entrepreneurial project ?

The project my colleague and I are working on involves developing a new digital inclusion and teaching medium with a highly social approach. The purpose of this medium is to integrate young people’s use of computers, social media and technology in general into new forms of teaching.

As new technology enthusiasts, we have observed the keen interest that young people have for computers and “hacking”, and the surprisingly small number of them at the Fablabs. They don’t offer many courses or workshops for people looking for training in computer sciences and new technologies. So our idea was to offer a service alongside the Fablabs to design more accessible, innovative workshops. Concretely, we want to teach young people things they don’t learn in class (middle school/high school), but that they will have to deal with in their further studies, such as designing software /objects that are truly useful to them.

Alongside this service, we want to provide a travelling offer to bring the Fablabs to outlying places to increase the positive social impact of this kind of site. For this, we want to be able to reuse equipment that is often found in middle schools and high schools and is not used due to a lack of time and/or knowledge.

I graduated with a science baccalaureate, and I didn’t really study computers until I got to engineering school, and I’m sure that if I had started earlier I would have been able to meet all the challenges I imagined of back then.

Currently, we are looking for partners who can help us develop our idea.

How will MGPIE help you in developing your project?

I hope to get more than just knowledge out of MGPIE, I’m looking forward to developing automatic reactions, reflexes. Our highly technical studies gave us a few notions of project management and entrepreneurship, but most of the time we mainly wallowed in lines of code and electronic diagrams, so it is hard to integrate all these non-technical notions. With this Master, I am hoping to move beyond all that completely and to delve into a new world. I notably want to learn as much as possible from the instructors’ adventures and experiences. Lastly, I want to take advantage of the exercises to try to innovate in areas unknown to me, so I can apply these methods to my project and thus improve it with crosscutting ideas.

At this stage, what do you like the most about the program?

Starting in the first weeks, the courses focusing on ideation and exploration helped me to discover research methods and ways of constructing ideas that helped me diversify my project. Group work is also fascinating and beneficial for reflections, with most of the courses including exercises with several participants. Lastly, our discussions with the instructors are very rewarding and motivating for us to live the entrepreneurial adventure.