The ILB and its alchemy of multidisciplinarity

You have just opened the fifth issue of IRIS, 100% digital… Like many projects realized since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic! IRIS is a publication that provides a complete overview of ILB activities – and you will find many of them in these pages. They are all based on the same idea of partnership and co-creation. Together we seek answers for a world in transition.

Here’s an example:
For fifteen years, the Finance and Sustainable Development Chair of the Institut Louis Bachelier has gathered a large community of researchers. The Chair is multidisciplinary: over the years, junior and senior researchers, economists, financiers and mathematicians, have become accustomed to collaborating on its various research themes. The Chair is nourished by the encounter of theoretical issues with the business concerns of the research teams of its sponsors, Crédit Agricole and EDF. It also draws on a number of institutional scientific partnerships: with the Centre de Mathématiques Appliquées of the Ecole Polytechnique, with three Dauphine research centres in economics, finance, and mathematics (LEDa, DRM, CEREMADE), and with EDF R&D through a close partnership with the EDF Fime laboratory.

It is this remarkable alchemy of multidisciplinarity, of partnerships with the best public and private, academic and business institutions, of long-term collaborations between researchers of very different statuses and institutions that has accounted for the success and longevity of this Chair. It is what has allowed theoreticians to be inspired by operational problems and, conversely, it is what has given research engineers rapid access to the latest advances in the best international research. It has enabled researchers in economics and finance to benefit from powerful mathematical tools, and has inspired mathematicians to develop new mathematical frameworks for modelling.

None of this would have been possible without the Institut Louis Bachelier. The ILB and its Foundations is the only institution in France that provides the institutional framework within which an ecosystem of this kind can be built and implemented: multidisciplinary, sustainable, with public-private partnerships and with research institutions of all kinds, and operating independently of the academic environment.

This ability of the Institut Louis Bachelier to transcend all borders is a unique asset for France, for research, and for researchers and research engineers. Of course, much research can be done without crossing scientific or administrative borders. Such borders also have their advantages: the quality of a scientific study in economics, finance or mathematics can generally only be assessed by peers who are familiar with the context, the issues, the usefulness and the originality of a given advance.

But many of the major advances in research can only be achieved by breaking down scientific and administrative boundaries. Some because they are at the crossroads of several disciplines. Others because they require the cooperation of theorists and operational personnel. And others simply because they can only be achieved through the collaboration of researchers with complementary knowledge but who are attached to different or even competing institutions in terms of prestige.

Overcoming borders – that’s what the Institut Louis Bachelier is all about.

Enjoy your reading and a safe return to the good summer times.

Jean-Michel Lasry,
Scientific Director of the ILB Datalab and chairman of the steering committee of the Finance and Sustainable Development Chair

Watch the English version HERE