Club Avenir: Jean-Marie Toulouse named exceptional personality of the year
November 14, 2012
On November 3, in front of 400 guests gathered in Montréal for the annual Fondation Club Avenir gala, Professor Emeritus Jean-Marie Toulouse was recognized as exceptional personality of the year. This was the ninth edition of the event, which salutes members of the Canadian Algerian and extended Maghrebian community who have distinguished themselves with their accomplishments. The exceptional personality of the year award is handed out at the ceremony, usually to a prominent figure in the host community.
The Fondation Club Avenir encourages integration through excellence and entrepreneurship. By paying tribute to Professor Toulouse, it saluted his contributions to the recognition of Maghrebian entrepreneurship and the openness he showed toward the community when he was HEC Montréal Director, from 1995 to 2006.
Professor Toulouse’s name is closely associated with entrepreneurship, a field that he helped to win recognition for as a subject of university study. He was responsible for creating Quebec’s first MBA course in entrepreneurship, in 1976, along with many other courses and programs in this field. From 1975 to 1979, he was Director of Research at HEC Montréal and, from 1977 to 1979, Director of the joint PhD program offered with Concordia University, McGill University and UQÀM. He was the first holder, from 1988 to 1994, of the Maclean Hunter Chair of Entrepreneurship, today the Rogers – J. A. Bombardier Chair of Entrepreneurship. He also actively participated in various initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship. All these achievements earned him the award of excellence for a professor-entrepreneur from the Fondation de l’entrepreneurship, in 1991.
Professor Toulouse has been a Member of the Royal Society of Canada since 1997 and an Officer of the Ordre national du Québec since 2004, and has won many other awards and distinctions. The most important: Lien d'Or, Université EM Lyon (2006); Honorary PhD, Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (2005); medal from the Fondation Édouard-Montpetit (1995), and Award of Merit from the Association des diplômés de l'Université de Montréal (1993).
Jean-Marie Toulouse holds a BPh in Psychology and an LPs and a PhD in Social Psychology from the Université de Montréal. He was a postdoctoral fellow in Business Administration at the University of California in Los Angeles. After teaching at Université Laval, UQÀM and the University of Ottawa, he made his career at HEC Montréal from 1973 until he retired, in 2008.