TSE-P Historical background


The first research partnerships at TSE were born in the 1980s from a match between a need and an opportunity. The need was to find a new approach to funding economic research in France.

Jean-Jacques Laffont, founder of the Toulouse group of economists, had identified France's lack of attractiveness for researchers. He succeeded in convincing a few renowned economists to come to Toulouse and created a world-renowned economics department: Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI) in 1989. The challenge was to find funding without compromising the independence of researchers or diverting them from their scientific approach. This is how TSE has developed long-term partnerships with private and public economic actors.

The opportunity was thus given to put researchers in contact with practitioners, allowing them to better understand the major emerging strategic and societal issues. The scope of these partnerships, coupled with close exchanges with economic actors, has enabled researchers to develop original research subjects that meet two criteria: on the one hand, they must be relevant to the company's strategy and, on the other hand, they must be validated by the scientific community.

In 2018, the TSE-Partnership Foundation (TSE-P) was created, dedicated to partnership research, under the aegis of the Jean-Jacques Laffont-TSE Foundation. Until the creation of TSE-P in 2018, the partnership research was managed by the IDEI.

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