Agents of Innovation: Entrepreneurs, Facilitators and Intrapreneurs

What does it mean to innovate? What skills are needed? What thought processes are involved? Answers to these questions can be found in the real-life stories of Agents of Innovation.

Louis Jacques Filion and chapter co-authors Rico J. Baldegger, Candido Borges, Fernando Dolabela, Joëlle Hafsi and Francine Richer, present six fascinating case histories of three different types of agents of innovation: entrepreneurs, who create new products or services, facilitators, or process innovators, who help entrepreneurs to develop their enterprises, and intrapreneurs, who innovate within the organizations that employ them. In the second part of Agents of Innovation, a set of exercises guide readers as they develop their own innovative thinking process.

Valuable to researchers, students, and those about to branch out into the world of business, Agents of Innovation informs many different disciplines, and in particular strategy - the sister discipline of entrepreneurship as far as the implementation of innovation is concerned.

Louis Jacques Filion is Emeritus Professor at HEC Montréal, Canada, where he directed the Rogers J.-A.-Bombardier Chair of Entrepreneurship from 1995 to 2016. He has been a speaker at many of the best-known institutions and conferences and over the decades has studied hundreds of agents of innovation throughout the world. In this book, he suggests that the field of entrepreneurship should be extended to include not only entrepreneurs but also facilitators and intrapreneurs.