Xavier Lesage

As an Entrepreneurship Referent, he was responsible for ESSCA Entreprendre, the support system for the school’s entrepreneurial project leaders, and Incub’Essca (2015-2018), the Essca incubator located on the Boulogne campus.

He is the educational director of the MSc Entrepreneurship and Design Thinking, a dual degree program in collaboration with the École de Design de Québec de l’Université de Laval (Canada).

He works in the Entrepreneurship Major on the follow-up of entrepreneurship and business development projects. He is the designer of the blended learning entrepreneurship awareness course, which was awarded by the AACSB as one of the 10 outstanding pedagogical innovations in 2016.

A former student of ENS Cachan and holder of a doctoral thesis in management sciences from Ecole Centrale Paris, his work focuses on innovation and internationalisation strategies for SMEs, innovation and business models, institutional entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial process and entrepreneurial support.

Together with A. Jacquemin (UCL), he received the HEC Paris Bruno Roux de Bézieux Foundation Prize in 2014 at the 5th Journées Georges Doriot for the paper “Logiques d’action pour surmonter le doute entrepreneurial : faut-il être ambidextre ou effectual?” published in 2016 in the journal Management International (vol. 20, n°2) “Comment l’entrepreneur peut-il surmonter le doute? Contribution of the theory of execution ”

In 2015, together with R. Maucuer (Essca) and S. Ronteau (Audencia), he was awarded with the prize for the best article of the XXIVth Conference of the International Association of Strategic Management (AIMS). The paper was published in 2018 in Finance Contrôle Stratégie: Emergence d’un business model innovant dans une start-up : le rôle structurant des narrations.

He has been the guest co-editor of the special issue on entrepreneurial support of the Revue Entreprendre et Innover, “L’accompagnement entrepreneurial sous tension” (n°36).

He has been is coordinator for a 3-year research project (2016-2019) aiming at supporting project holders in the field of creative industries, together with Ateliers de Paris and La direction de l’Attractivité et de L’Emploi de la Ville de Paris. He was also coordinator of the study project at ADAPEI49 (2016-2018).

Xavier Lesage has also been working as an international consultant to Japan for more than 10 years. First on missions as a foreign trade officer with the METI (Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry) and METI Kansai, he acts as an international expert for the city of Kyoto. He was one of the designers and animators of the Kyoto Contemporary Project (2011-2017) and coordinator of the “Savoir-faire des Takumi” project (2018), an innovative collaboration project between the cities of Paris and Kyoto.