Icam students at the 9th SoliTudiant Challenge

Nantes
11 Jul 2024

On Thursday, June 20, the Icam site in Nantes once again hosted the national final of the SoliTudiant competition organized by Green Actes, which this year featured 67 teams from 27 schools !

The SoliTudiant challenge consists in creating teams of students to work with an ESAT (Etablissement ou service d’aide par le travail) or an EA (Entreprise adaptée) to develop a project that is either ergonomic for disabled workers, or a vector for diversification or business growth to provide work for more employees in difficulty. As part of the competition, the two best projects are awarded prizes, and the budget (€15,000 this year) enables the ESAT to finance the recommended work or proposed actions.

Of the 67 teams competing this year, a team of students from the Icam Nantes site in I4-8 EDP (Entreprendre Développer Piloter) was selected as one of the 5 finalists. Émile Guerville and Jérôme Jacquin, in their minor, were able to help Clémence Pina and Oscar Citarel, who saw the project through to the end during their major.

Their work consisted in studying the possibility of developing a value chain for unsold vegetables, based on the existing restaurant at the ESAT des Bazinières in La Roche sur Yon. After doing some sourcing, and identifying the difficulties of guaranteeing a constant volume of unsold produce, the group proposed a strategic pivot to the ESAT, and developed the possibility of another activity based on increasing the restaurant’s capacity, developing meals carried in-house, and setting up a foodtruck for festivals and certain industrial zones.

To prove the viability of the project, they developed a simulator as part of the EDP theme, enabling them to assign times and structural costs, and calculate the volumes required and the cost price for each type of menu.

Although the jury did not award a prize to the group, it did recognize the quality of the work carried out and the relevance of the simulator, and asked that it be distributed to national ESATs considering diversifying into this sector of activity.

Icam’s involvement in this annual competition was initiated by the Sit Up project, for those who remember it, then taken up by students in the EEPA theme and Jean-François Largeau for several years, before being piloted again two years ago by the EDP theme.

As well as confronting a different business model, and making an effective contribution to companies with little room for maneuver, this commitment also enables us to discover different, but nonetheless relevant, ways of working. And the encounters are always enriching for all concerned !