About

Georgios Polychronopoulos is a Research Fellow in Sustainable Development at the IMD Center for Social Innovation. His research primarily focuses on how entrepreneurial activities can drive positive societal change, specifically within the realms of social entrepreneurship, social impact, and civic wealth creation. He collaborates closely with Professor Sophie Bacq and esteemed colleagues across the IMD community to drive impactful research aimed at fostering a sustainable and equitable future.

Polychronopoulos has led the authorship of a publication in the Journal of Management Studies that develops an outcome-based typology of social enterprises. He has also contributed to edited book chapters and numerous international academic conferences.

Holding a Ph.D. in Management and Managerial Economics from Prague University of Economics and Business, an MBA from Hellenic Open University, a master’s degree in Theoretical Mathematics, and an undergraduate degree in Mathematics from the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Polychronopoulos brings a diverse academic background. He has also taught Mathematics and served as the CEO of a B Corp certified company in the food industry sector.

Additionally, Polychronopoulos is an ad hoc reviewer for journals such as the Journal of Business Venturing and the Journal of Small Business Management. He received the Best Reviewer Award 2024 from the Academy of Management’s Entrepreneurship Division.

Christina Hertel is Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Geneva School of Economics and Management. She holds a PhD from the Technical University of Munich and worked as a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL. Christina’s work focuses on the intersection of entrepreneurship, societal impact, and collective action.

Over the past ten years, she has studied collective entrepreneurial solutions as an approach for generating highly effective solutions to local and societal problems. Christina currently co-leads the SNF-funded research project “Unleashing civic wealth creation through community entrepreneurship” with Sophie Bacq. Since 2019, Christina has also been driving the development of research-driven approaches and solutions to assess sustainability and impact in startups and SMEs.

Christina is Director of the Geneva Responsible Entrepreneurship Center which develops a wide variety of offers for students and entrepreneurs, supporting them to build responsible businesses. She frequently gives master classes and trainings on sustainability and impact measurement and management in startups and serves on the juries of multiple entrepreneurship programs. Together with a community of experts and impact-oriented scholars in Switzerland, she is working on tools for and research on sustainability measurement and reporting.

Christina’s work has been published in leading journals in the field such as the Journal of Business Venturing and the Academy of Management Discoveries. She serves on the board of reviewers for the Journal of Business Venturing and reviews for most top journals in entrepreneurship and management.

Rossella Rocchino is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with a joint appointment at the University of Geneva’s Institute of Management and IMD’s Center for Social Innovation, collaborating on the SNF-funded research project “Unleashing civic wealth creation through community entrepreneurship.” Her research focuses on the intersection of community entrepreneurship, local development, and civic wealth creation.

Rossella obtained her PhD at the Technical University Munich’s School of Management, a master’s degree in International Management from Nova Business School, and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Pavia.

As an active member of the academic community, Rossella serves as an ad hoc reviewer for leading publications in her field, including the Journal of Business Venturing.

David Villegas is a PhD candidate in Management at the University of Geneva under the co-supervision of Sophie Bacq (IMD) and Christina Hertel (University of Geneva).

Holding a Master’s degree in environmental and agricultural economics from the Agro Institute in Montpellier, he worked with public and private local organizations to promote and implement sustainable development principles in Geneva.

His PhD research will focus on studying community entrepreneurship and its potential to foster civic wealth creation in the Swiss context as part of the SNF-funded research project “Unleashing civic wealth creation through community entrepreneurship.”

Shih-Han Huang is a Senior Researcher & Writer at the IMD Center for Social Innovation. An experienced case writer, her work alongside Vanina Farber on Angaza, a pay-as-you-go technology social enterprise, won the Outstanding Case Writer Competition category at the Case Centre Awards and Competitions 2022 and the EFMD’s Case Writing Competition African Business Category. Her areas of interest encompass social entrepreneurship, impact investment and innovative finance.

Huang holds an MBA from INSEAD and an undergraduate degree in economics from Harvard University. Before joining IMD, she worked in various financial fields including asset management and private banking.

Peter Wuffli is Honorary Chair of IMD’s Foundation Board and Member of the Advisory Board at the Center for Social Innovation. He is also the Founder and Chair of the elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization.

elea was established in 2006 with the purpose of fighting absolute poverty (i.e., less than US$3 daily income) through entrepreneurial means, and is a philanthropic impact investor in the fields of agricultural value chains, informal retail and last mile distribution, employable skill building, and digital solutions.

Wuffli also serves on the board of Sygnum, a digital asset bank in Zurich and Singapore, and he is the Vice Chair at the Zürich Opera House.

Previously, he was Partner at McKinsey & Company, CEO of UBS Group, and Chair at Partners Group (a global leader for private market investments listed at Zürich Stock Exchange) and IMD respectively.

Wuffli earned a PhD in economics from the University of St. Gallen. He regularly publishes articles and books on themes of globalization, ethics, impact investing, and leadership, including Inclusive Leadership – A Framework for the Global Era.

Andreas R Kirchschläger is the CEO of the elea Foundation for Ethics in Globalization and the President of the Max Schmidheiny Foundation.

He serves as a board member of the HSG Foundation, GCA Altium Corporation, PG Impact Investments AG, and some of elea’s portfolio companies.

As Managing Director and President of the St. Gallen Foundation for International Studies, Kirchschläger led the annual International Management Symposium St. Gallen for more than a decade.

He holds a Master’s degree in law and economics from the University of St. Gallen, where he is a visiting lecturer.

Katherine Milligan has supported leading social entrepreneurs and student start-up teams for over a decade and is a sought-after speaker and coach.

She is a Top 100 Women in Social Entrepreneurship awarded by the Euclid Network, a Director at the Collective Change Lab, a founding member of the Geneva Innovation Movement, an Accelerate2030 Advisory Council Member, and an Unreasonable Mentor.

Milligan’s project as an elea Fellow will be a deep exploration around a series of questions related to the larger question of how we can create a new frame for social entrepreneurship.

Questions for exploration include:

• How do we shift our belief systems about how social change happens?
• How do we tell systems change stories in a way that reflects the reality of how social change really happens?
• How can we educate students, social change leaders, and aspiring leaders about how cultural change efforts – changes in mental models, social norms, and power dynamics – must be a vital, even central, emphasis of any attempt to “solve a social problem” rather than the peripheral role they are currently relegated to?

Maximilian Martin is the Founder of Impact Economy. In 2003, he created the first university course in Europe on social entrepreneurship at the University of Geneva, and in 2004 the first global philanthropic services and impact investing department for a bank in Europe, UBS.

With innovative investment transactions and more than one hundred articles and position papers, his work has helped define the trajectory of market-based solutions and the impact revolution in finance, business, and philanthropy.

For the UK Cabinet Office and the G8 policy makers’ conference, Martin wrote the Primer on impact investing “Status of the Social Impact Investing Market” in 2013, which considered this new branch of the financial industry for the first time at G8 level.

He will conduct research and write a book that aims to offer similarly influential insights as past work that help business leaders to come to terms with, and seize the resulting opportunities, of the currently emerging new financial order.

María Helena Jaén is an honorary professor at the Universidad de Los Andes (Colombia), professor at the International Faculty IESA, and adjunct professor at the Patti and Allan Herbert School of Business at the University of Miami (United States).

Before pursuing an academic career, she was an international consultant in public health and health systems for multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, PAHO, USAID, UNDP, and UNICEF for 16 years.

She works with Vanina Farber to develop innovative case studies across several dimensions of social innovation.