Gabriel Tarde was a French sociologist and criminologist whose work is rediscovered from time to time. Economists of innovation have paid insufficient attention to an author who devoted a large part of his work to the laws of imitation and invention. The purpose of this paper is threefold. The...

After a long period of disregard and underestimation, the issue of innovation in services is now being taken seriously in economic theory, as well as in public policy. This is not yet the case for innovation in public services. The objective of this paper is to propose a reinterpretation of the...