Lionel Martellini (EDHEC Quantum Institute): Why business leaders need quantum awareness, not quantum washing

Yuval Boger interviews Lionel Martellini, finance professor at the EDHEC and founding director of the EDHEC Quantum Institute. Lionel describes his unusual path from finance to astrophysics and why business schools should teach quantum awareness to future leaders. They discuss core quantum concepts, the danger of overhyping “quantum washing,” and the real prospects for quantum applications in finance. The conversation also explores executive education, practical use cases, and how businesses should prepare for quantum technologies.

Transcript

Yuval Boger: Hello Lionel, and thank you for being here today.

Lionel Martellini: Hi, it’s a pleasure.

Yuval: So who are you and what do you do?

Lionel: Ah, it’s a good question. Who am I? That’s a tough one. Well, I guess I’ve lived a large part of my life in a state of superposition between being a finance professor, first in the US and then I moved back to France, my home country, and I started a career as a finance professor at EDHEC Business School, which is one of these top European institutions. And that’s one part of my life. And then on the side, I kind of kept pursuing a career, or not really a career, but just doing physics on the side, just as probably as a way to be faithful or loyal to my childhood dreams. As I grew up, I was very keenly interested in physics. And for some funny reason, life has not, you know, wanted me to start like undergrad studies in physics. I went to business and math and stats and finance and stochastic calculus and all these things. But yeah, anyway, so that’s kind of my background. It’s a dual background. I went back to physics on the late, you may call that a midlife crisis, but I got a PhD in physics and was doing relativistic astrophysics, like gravitational waves, black holes, with the LIGO-Virgo collaboration, you know, in my 40s. So there was like a midlife crisis. And then, so I kept doing these two things together, right, as a form of schizophrenia, in a way, so doing physics on the weekends and on the weekdays I was doing finance. But recently I proposed, I suggested to my dean that we launched an institute. So it’s called the EDHEC Quantum Institute, for which I serve as the founding director. And I guess it’s probably, I guess, the first quantum institute within a business school. And so, well, now that’s what I’m doing now. So my superposition has collapsed. I’m kind of combining those two aspects of my life, physics and finance, in a way, within a single job.