Theseus International Management Institute
Theseus International Management Institute was founded in 1989 as a graduate business school focussed on the high technology sector. In 2004 it merged into EDHEC.
The beginning
Institute Theseus was founded in 1989 with the support of France Télécom, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, MIT Sloan School of Management, Politecnico di Milano and several other major European corporations to create the future managers of the information technology age. It offered a mid-career MBA in the English language in Sophia Antipolis, South France, in what was billed as “International City of Wisdom, Science and Technology” .
Professors
Thierry Zylberberg was its founding director while former MIT Sloan School of Management program director Mel Horwitch was professor and founding dean of management. Claudio Ciborra, Louis Pouzin and Charles Wiseman were also in the founding faculty along with some 100 distinguished members of the information technology academe. They came from Hitotsubashi in Japan to Harvard in the US, from Cambridge in the UK to Dartmouth, Duke, Stern in the US via the Technion in Israel, from Apple to Bull to HP, IBM and Xerox and from Booz Allen to McKinsey Consulting. Ahmet Aykaç took over as director general from 1996 until the school's merger with EDHEC in 2004
The Charter Batch
Its charter batch had 18 mid career executives aged 25 years to 45 years, from entrepreneurs to CIOs of EDF/GDF, from editor/ writer to and underwriter and from telecom engineers to bankers.
The pioneers who joined the charter batch of Theseus included John Fowler, Christophe Fox, Yves Patoreaux, Yves-Andre Leroux, Remi Dupuy, Philip Reynaud, Sean Phelan, Sanjay Kumar, Satish Jha, Herve Podvin, Mark Gherardi, Jacob Op Hij, Bertrand Kornfeld, Bernard Cottrand and Marc Mesle.
Innovation in Business Education
It was an innovative experiment that triggered a whole series of similar MBA programs with focus on integrating information technologies in several universities. Already in 1989, participants received an Apple computer and an email address which was the first email address for most of the students. Shortly after, a forum was set on The WELL - the birthplace of the online community movement.
Executive education
Theseus International Management Institute, was ranked No 1 worldwide for Internationality in Custom Executive Programs by Financial Times Survey of Business Schools (May 2003)., and 37th overall . The school was accredited, and in 2005 re-accredited, by the Association of MBAs.
MBA programme
Alongside executive education programmes, the core activity at Theseus was its intensive MBA programme, run full-time over one year or, from 2002, as a part-time MBA run jointly with the Center for International Business Education and Research at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. The Theseus MBA was ranked 26th in Europe, and the school as a whole 37th, by the Financial Times in 2004 .
Merger with EDHEC
Now Theseus is the English-language graduate programme independent sub-unit of the Ecole de hautes études commerciales du nord grande ecole. It offers an MBA from the EDHEC campus in Nice which uses a modular structure, allowing full- and part-time students to study alongside each other.