Our vision

Training curious, responsible and open-minded engineers

Centrale Nantes has a dual vocation:

• A vocation to teach, by creating and disseminating advanced scientific and technological knowledge, with programmes open to the diversity of knowledge and with an international outlook.
• A vocation to contribute to economic development. The school aims to support companies in the field of innovation.

Three main differentiating axes of theoretical and applicative investigation and training:

• energy transition
• manufacturing
• healthcare

For nearly one century, from Institut Polytechnique de l'Ouest, to Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique to Centrale Nantes today, the school has demonstrated its ability and willingness to evolve and transform continuously. And this, with the strong commitment to remain in step with global technical and economic developments.

Centrale Nantes has a mindset and a mode of operation oriented towards exploration, entrepreneurial spirit and practical application, from theory to the design of solutions adapted to economic challenges and industrial players. Our programmes prompt students to reflect on the major societal challenges of the 21st century. Among these, the three major growth and innovation challenges of energy transition, manufacturing and healthcare emerge and structure the curriculum.

Each of these three axes of research and training is reflected in the competences of the school's laboratories. They are the product of a promise for the future, and of an indepth analysis of global transformation.

Values

In a progressive environment, where the professions of tomorrow will rely on knowledge that does not exist today, and where this reality is revitalised by a globalisation that requires careful observation of a perpetually changing context, Centrale Nantes strives to share with its students, teachers, researchers, staff, and all its partners three fundamental values...

Openness

Centrale Nantes' ability to adapt and its appetite to seize opportunities and build a constantly evolving project is an essential value for the school and its stakeholders. This openness is multifaceted:

• Openness to differences in culture and thus international connection
• Openness to social, physical or cultural differences, and thus encountering diverse aspects of the world we live in
• Openness to new scientific and technical challenges which, whatever their forms, impart the desire to move forward in an uncertain universe.

This openness is based on a human and technical training which allows everyone to approach with enthusiasm, but without danger, a trajectory with assumed risks. The School wishes to give each student a taste for thoughtful initiative, whether it is intended for professional inventiveness, or for the fulfillment of his lifetime plans.

Ethics

Beyond its necessary contribution to the creation of the wealth of a structure, engineers as well as teachers and researchers have the moral duty to be responsible actors for the future of the planet, for social equilibrium through job creation, for the professional well-being of their employees, and to participate in the responsible edification of the city, its social as well as entrepreneurial fabric.

The message of the School is not only that of corporate social responsibility, but also that of ethics: to provide meaning to one's professional activity, a meaning that can even surpass the self, but that carries the vision that man is at the center of a world which, without ethics, could be under threat.

In 2014, a major debate was organized at the School on the following question: "engineer and citizen or citizen engineer"? The response of the participating students and staff was almost unanimous: an engineer must be intrinsically citizen, the two are inseparable.

Courage

The courage which combines boldness and action is a value which the School aims to inculcate as deeply inherent in the professions practised at the School, as well as those imparted by the School.

The audacity to imagine the improbable or the risky and, at the same time, the capacity to transform it into reality: thus the new idea and its realization are born.

But this courage in action must be based on:

• the courage to speak out and make oneself heard,
• the courage to initiate and undertake
• the courage to be oneself, that is to say to build one's career path with regard to one's aspirations, without regard to the views of others or current trends.