While other consulting firms aim to increase a company’s profitability or boost a flagging brand, Fornas’ company, EcoAct, offers advice on how companies can increase their environmental and social responsibility.
“I wanted to do something with meaning,” explains Fornas, speaking to BusinessBecause from EcoAct’s offices. “In my past professional experience, [I was] working in industry, working in big companies. I wanted to have a professional experience which would be meaningful to me, but would also have meaning in what I could bring to people.”
Established in 2005, EcoAct initially focused on renovating and restoring dilapidated parts of France; roadsides, housing settlements, and brownfield sites. But, as Fornas tells us, “It was quite difficult to make them [our clients, which included giants of industry such as General Electric and BNP Paribas] pay for the cost of a such an operation!”
Thierry Fornas, HEC Paris MBA Graduate, 2006
With France’s high corporate taxes, EcoAct had to offer more to the companies it was consulting, and in 2007, the firm changed course, focusing on carbon reduction schemes.
EcoAct’s clients were given smart and financially efficient ways to curb their carbon emissions. People in the developing world were also given job opportunities, as EcoAct’s carbon-offsetting schemes ranged from investing in a hydroelectric plant in Yancun, China, to a biogas farm in Itararé, Brazil.
Across EcoAct’s projects, there are two constants: the reduction of carbon emissions and the spread of economic advantages to some of the world’s most deprived areas
But while HEC Paris varied and stimulating MBA curriculum does not yet include a course on “Saving the World”, Fornas says that his time there was immensely valuable. “Everything I learned was for me really meaningful and useful,” he says, “I’m still using all my books!”
For Fornas, trained as an engineer, the move from microelectronics to eco-consulting was only possible thanks to his MBA and the HEC syllabus.
“What I’m doing is completely different to my ten years of experience before [the MBA],” he says, “I took the maximum from the MBA course and I use eighty percent of it every day.”
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