Emile Granveau: "CREDA enabled me to develop my skills while saving time."

Emile Granveau (Bo220) showed an entrepreneurial spirit from an early age. After his sophomore year of high school, he took a gap year in Jacksonville, near Chicago. Upon his return, after earning his high school diploma with a specialization in “Engineering Sciences,” he enrolled in a preparatory class for the Grandes Écoles in Bordeaux. At the suggestion of his best childhood friend and the friend’s older brother—both graduates of a business school who would later become his business partners—he founded a company in Bordeaux called Plug’heur during his two years in preparatory school. The idea was to launch a mobile phone battery charging solution in Europe that already existed in Asia.
Admitted to Grande Ecole Engineering Programme the Arts et Métiers campus Arts et Métiers Bordeaux, he continued to launch his company alongside his engineering studies and was also involved in student life through the Student Union (he was part of the team for the May 2022 Gala in Bordeaux).
During his third year, the CREDA program allowed him to explore different subjects relevant to his chosen career path:“It was a great experience; the instructors are incredibly engaging, and my classmates share the same drive as I do. I gained familiarity with the legal sector, marketing, and finance. I was able to apply my knowledge to what I do every day at my company, and that’s really great.”
Today, the company co-founded by Emile is four years old, and nine people have been hired by the three founding partners. Plug’heur is the second-largest player in terms of revenue on the French market.
Emile handles technical, financial, legal, human resources, and operational matters, while his partners focus on sales and marketing:“From the very beginning, we’ve been careful not to mix business with personal matters, and it’s working out very well. ”
For 2023, the goal is to triple revenue in the French market and begin expanding across Europe: “We work with high-traffic locations. Historically, our first clients were shopping malls, and for the past year, we’ve also been equipping events.”
Emile’s advice for starting a business? “Don’t wait to test your idea; create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to gauge the demand.”
What’s next for this 23-year-old entrepreneur? “I want to do lots of things—travel, start other businesses… But for now, I’m focused on continuing to grow Plug’heur.”

Jean-Robert Agher: "Writing a thesis using CREDA's tools gave me a different approach to business creation."

During his studies at Arts et Métiers, Jean-Robert Agher (Ai.209) spent time in Australia atthe University of Melbourne, where he took the Entrepreneurship program.
After working for two years in Switzerland at Richemont in the production of luxury watches, he took over the management of a small company with about ten employees, Romans Industrie. His goal was to restructure the company and give it a new dynamic. It was at this point that he decided to rethink Romans Industrie's business model from a research perspective.
He discussed his project with a colleague, Baptiste Piclet, CEO of Euros, a company that manufactures medical prostheses and whose shareholders are the same as those of Romans Industrie. Baptiste Piclet, an Arts et Métiers engineer, had carried out the CREDA assessment and had written a thesis with Patrice Dubois and Améziane Aoussat, director of the Product Design and Innovation Laboratory, a few years earlier. This is how his thesis topic, "Proposing a coherent business model design approach," took shape, which will be carried out as part of a CIFRE agreement with Euros. His research work was applied to a start-up called Protectus, which specializes in medical textiles. Améziane Aoussat supervised his thesis, providing the necessary guidance for the development of his work, which was monitored by Patrice Dubois.
Following his thesis, the company Proctectus hired him to continue working on innovation, particularly on the product, service, and business model as a whole.

What did Jean-Robert Agher gain from writing a thesis based on the concepts covered in the CREDA expertise? "Although writing a thesis is a difficult task, it offers significant personal enrichment and also brings about a major change in one's relationship with knowledge. This is because knowledge is no longer top-down, as it was during my engineering studies, but is shaped by the pace of research findings. The CREDA expertise is aimed at students and provides them with a structured methodology for thinking about business creation. I have only added a small brick to its construction, but it is a very valuable approach and I find it interesting to have this differentiated teaching method."