On December 5, the marketing innovator will be appointed to a new chair of Social Business at HEC, the Paris business school. His mission is to bring fresh thinking to the role of business in a world where unbridled profit-seeking has brought financial instability and environmental concerns. And to share those thoughts with 500 students on HEC's masters programme.

The French title of the chair - Entreprise et Pauvreté, drawing the link between business and poverty - gives a better sense of just how radical the project is.

The two co-presidents of the chair, whose role is to supervise Prof Dalsace, are Nobel prize-winner Muhammad Yunus, the entrepreneurial Bangladeshi economist who built a successful micro-finance institution, and Martin Hirsch, former head of revered French homeless charity Emmaüs and now a French government adviser on action against poverty.