Entrepreneurship, Strategy & Innovation

Researchers in entrepreneurship and strategy who embrace the "practice turn" focus on the study of practices, conceptualized as organized human activities endowed with sociomateriality and implemented on the basis of specific skills and tools. The practice turn guides both our research and our teaching, with research findings being translated into course content for undergraduate and graduate students.

The adoption of the practice turn raises questions and presents many challenges in both the production of knowledge and its sharing. Our department is committed to exploring innovative ways to create and share practice-based knowledge.

Entrepreneurs, strategists, innovators, leaders, and policymakers make decisions in an increasingly uncertain and volatile environment. To deal effectively with uncertainty, individuals use foresight to manage possible futures. They make decisions based on the future(s) that guide their actions and those of their organizations.

Adopting a foresight perspective offers new opportunities for entrepreneurship and strategy professionals to better understand how organizations emerge and evolve. Such a perspective is also being applied to great effect in the classroom.

Engaging in entrepreneurship and strategy involves not only the emergence and transformation of firms, but also the (re)construction of the identities of the people involved in these processes.

There is no one way to be an entrepreneur, innovator, or strategist, because there is no universal, replicable model of what that means. The mechanisms by which our students and interns construct their professional identities vary from context to context and from individual to individual.

Taking into account context and diversity means developing our awareness of the social and psychological biases associated with the perception and evaluation of others in order to improve the production and sharing of knowledge and thus facilitate the identity (re)construction of our students and trainees when they engage in entrepreneurship, strategy or innovation.

Issues related to entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation are not limited to the conception, creation and structuring of organizations, but also concern the evolution and reinvention of organizations over time. Business growth, identifying and mobilizing resources such as financing to support business growth is a key concern of our department.

Our focus on coaching, financing and business growth requires a deep understanding of the functioning of entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as innovation and sector clusters. How do entrepreneurs and decision-makers mobilize resources? How does the entire consulting profession work to improve the performance of organizations? These questions are of major importance to our students as future entrepreneurs, managers and innovators, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers.