Résumé : A group of young researchers from the ESI X summer school, HEC, Jouy-en-Josas 1994, give their personal views on the current status of, and prospects for, Combinatorial Optimisation. Several issues are considered and discussed with emphasis on a selected number of techniques: heuristics and polyhedral approaches, and problems: knapsack, quadratic 0-1 programming, machine scheduling, routing and network design. © 1995.