In this session, participants will explore the conditions under which the European industry can return to growth, with Anaïs Voy-Gillis — Doctor of Geography, associate researcher at the IAE de Poitiers, and Chief Strategy & CSR Officer at Humens, author of Pour une révolution industrielle.
Over just a few decades, deindustrialisation has eroded shares of GDP, skills, and productive capacity: a decline that has coincided with a weakening of the value chain and a growing dependence on foreign suppliers, technologies, and energy. Today that trajectory can be reversed: geopolitical instability, the reshaping of supply chains, and the energy transition are reopening space for reshoring — but not by inertia. It depends on deliberate choices around energy, strategic supplies, skills, and growth models. For SMEs, more exposed to shocks and with narrower room to adapt, it is at once the greatest risk and the most concrete opportunity.

Voy-Gillis makes a different point: industry is not only a matter of efficiency and costs, but a societal project to be redesigned around three axes — strategic autonomy, decarbonisation, and a new narrative for manufacturing, one capable of restoring its appeal to talent, territories, and capital. 

From this, participants will take away not an abstract picture but the levers to move their own business first. In particular, they will be able to:

• understand why European industry has weakened, and what it truly takes to reverse course
• grasp the potential of decarbonisation, productive and energy autonomy as levers for growth, not merely as costs to bear
• map their own critical dependencies — suppliers, technologies, energy, skills — and identify where to act
• assess their own growth model in light of the reindustrialisation trends underway in Europe.