On 1 July 2019, Émile Servan-Schreiber reported joining Lex Paulson, Brent Strickland and Bisan Abdulkader on stage for the inauguration of the School of Collective Intelligence at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Benguérir, Morocco. He described an inaugural oath delivered over the preceding weekend. The school’s own institutional account dates its beginnings to June 2019.
A second step followed in September. On 10 September, Servan-Schreiber announced that Hypermind was participating in the school’s creation and that courses would begin in October. His English-language post the same day described a new school dedicated to collective intelligence. The posts connect the inauguration with preparations for teaching.
Researching how people think together
The school’s official description brings cognitive science, data science, computer science, anthropology and economics into a common research and teaching programme. Its focus is how collective intelligence works, including how groups make decisions and solve problems. It describes programmes at master’s and doctoral level, alongside training for practitioners.
That gives the launch a wider purpose than a class in prediction markets. Forecasting is one application of organised collective judgement. The school also studies the processes through which people collaborate and the conditions under which collaboration succeeds.
What the institutional links establish
The September post named MIT, New York University and researchers at the École normale supérieure as partners. The school’s official account uses a more precise formulation: collaboration with scholars from leading institutions, including MIT, NYU and ENS. Those links brought the work of researchers at several universities into the school’s developing programme.
Hypermind’s company history corroborates its role in helping found the school in 2019 and says Servan-Schreiber teaches crowd forecasting there. The journal’s account of seminars at IE University explores a separate setting for his forecasting teaching.
The transition from a June inauguration to plans for autumn teaching gave the initiative a practical direction. A graduate school can connect explanations of collective intelligence with the skills needed to study it: designing experiments, assessing information and comparing methods. For forecasting, that means treating the organisation of a crowd as a subject for research as well as a source of predictions.
