Jean-François Ouellet
Jean-François Ouellet is an associate professor in marketing and entrepreneurship at HEC Montréal. A born entrepreneur, he was 16 when he founded his first company, Les Produits JV, which earned him a student entrepreneur award from the Business Development Bank of Canada. He later became a shareholder and head of marketing for Lyrtech, a small tech company based in the Quebec City area. Between 1997 and 2002, he was instrumental in taking the company public (TSX-V:LYT) and expanding its operations to 20 countries around the world. Between 2010 and 2014, he was the host of Génération INC., a business affairs program on the V television network, and is a regular speaker and workshop leader with private-and public-sector organizations. His expertise extends to product management, entrepreneurial-minded innovation, B2B marketing, and international marketing. He holds an MBA from Laval University and a PhD from University of Grenoble, where his dissertation involved the development of a machine-learning algorithm that modelled consumer memory dynamics with regards to novel brands in the context of innovation. He completed his post-doctorate in innovation management at MIT.