ENPC and VINCI enter into a strategic partnership around environmental transition and digital transformation

Nanterre, 28 April 2025

ENPC and VINCI enter into a strategic partnership
around environmental transition and digital transformation

• Stepping up synergies between academia, research and business to speed up transformation in the construction and infrastructure sectors.
• Pooling research capabilities and VINCI's business expertise to tackle the challenges arising from the ecological and digital transitions.

École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (ENPC-Institut Polytechnique de Paris) and the VINCI Group have entered into a strategic partnership to build skills and drive innovation aimed at tackling the challenges surrounding the ecological transition, namely sustainable mobility, the energy transition and urban development.

This partnership, which started up in early 2024, is strengthening synergies between ENPC's faculty and 12 research laboratories and VINCI's R&D teams. Its goal is to fast-track operational solution implementation and scale-up, through undertakings led by engineers who are familiar with the complex concerns facing today's world. It is also encouraging student entrepreneurship and collaborative innovation while challenging traditional models in order to modernise existing trades and invent the professions of the future.

The partnership is organised around five main focus areas:

• Learning: the partnership enhances engineering students' curricula (with lectures by VINCI Group engineers, on-site internships, supervised projects) and opens the door to jointly devising specialist master's level courses centred on emerging scientific fields, notably involving AI.
• Research and innovation: to address climate-related and industrial issues, the partnership is also reinforcing scientific collaboration between ENPC and VINCI, principally in the areas of low-carbon construction, smart infrastructure, urban resilience and AI applied to infrastructure construction and operation. It is an extension of the cooperation between VINCI's lab recherche environnement and ENPC's alumni network, aimed at spurring mutually beneficial projects.
• Entrepreneurship: Leonard, VINCI's innovation and foresight platform, works with a solid network of entrepreneurs and supports entrepreneurial initiatives within ENPC, providing methodological insight as well as matching student-entrepreneurs' projects with the Group's requirements.
• Professional integration: the partnership opens doors for young graduates at VINCI's various entities, tapping into the wide range of career paths and forward-looking skills available across the Group, and includes career guidance for young women, especially through mentoring.
• Conferences and public debate: the partnership includes plans to hold conferences that cross-fertilise scientific expertise and social and economic insight into the big issues in the construction and infrastructure sectors – for example Décider Maintenant ("Decide Now") seminars bringing together researchers, policymakers and business players to inform public debate.

Pierre Anjolras, VINCI's Chief Operating Officer: "We speed up today the transformation of our trades, in order to achieve the VINCI Group's environmental and digital transition, and that way address the issues our companies face every day, as well as our customers' and our other stakeholders' expectations. The challenges today are so far-reaching and complex that we need to harness technical expertise as well as scientific research to tackle them. This agreement with ENPC, a world-class academic standard-setter, will enable us to take a new look at our construction processes all the way from design to execution, and at the way we operate infrastructure, then take them to the next level."