Executive Director, Paris Innovation Review

Richard Robert is the executive director of Paris Innovation Review. He took over this position on March 1st, 2012, after a six-month period as the magazine’s chief editor.
A graduate from Ecole normale supérieure (Fontenay), he started his career in 1995 as an Assistant Professor in University of Caen. In these early years he published six books on literature and history of ideas. He also founded and managed for seven years a quarterly journal on contemporary literature, ‘Scherzo’ (Presses universitaires de France, 1997-2004). But what would be later called the Internet bubble provided jobs, ideas, prospects. He started to write on other topics and gradually left the academia for the Internet and publishing industry.
In Sept. 2002, soon after completing his PhD cum laude (‘Utopy and individuals, 1770-1810’), he was recruited by Confédération française démocratique du travail (CFDT), a moderate labor union with a tradition of intellectual networking (Michel Foucault was a familiar in the 80es). For seven years he was the chief editor of a quarterly review, ‘Cadres.’ He also served three years as an adviser for CFDT's secretary-general François Chérèque. During this period he worked with French think tanks such as La République des idées or En temps réel, writing political studies, translating books (from Suzanne Berger, Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff), as well as reading a lot of economics and political science.
In Nov. 2005 he joined political scientist Zaki Laidi, economists Charles Wyplosz and Lionel Fontagné and media entrepreneur Jean-Christophe Boulanger to launch Telos-eu.com, a European online intellectual agency first chaired by WTO’s Director-General Pascal Lamy. Telos publishes articles and op-eds on matters ranging from economic policy to international affairs; authors now include over 300 senior academics from 15 countries.
After quitting CFDT in 2009 Richard spent two years in Germany, working as a freelance writer, enjoying schwarzbrot and getting married. He came back to Paris in 2011 to join ParisTech Review (now Paris Innovation Review) as chief editor.
On the side he gives lectures, most of them at ENA (France's National School of Administration). In the last 10 years he has published numerous op-eds and articles on economical and political matters in French and international newspapers: Le Figaro, La Tribune, Slate, Les Echos, L'Express, Esprit, Cadres (Paris), Le Temps (Geneva), ECIPE, Green European Journal (Brussels), La Tribune (Algeria), The Moscow Times, The St. Petersburg Times, Otechestvenniye Zapiski (Russia), Eurointelligence (Frankfurt), Renewable International (Hannover), Sankei Shimbun (Tokyo), The News (Kazakhstan), Technomic Review (India).

Articles from this author

• 

  Finance / 2017-04-09

  Green sovereign bonds: tactical moves on an emerging market

  Richard Robert / Executive Director, Paris Innovation Review

  We already knew the greenback, here come the green bonds. This emerging security, whose yearly issuance still represents only 1% of the global bonds market, has the wind in its sails. Used primarily by institutions, large companies and local authorities, it has just entered the reference segment: sovereign bonds.