Ulla Engelmann

Head of Unit, Social Economy, Directorate General Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, European Commission (DG GROW)

Welcoming Remarks

Marie J. Bouchard

Professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal
President of the Scientific Commission on Social and Cooperative Economy of CIRIEC International

Marie J. Bouchard Marie J. Bouchard is full professor at Université du Québec à Montréal (Canada) and member of the Center for Research on Social Innovations (CRISES). She was nominated in 2015 President of the Scientific Commission on Social and Cooperative Economy of CIRIEC International. She presently acts as external coordinator of the project Opportunities and challenges of statistics on SSE, led by UNRISD for the United Nations Inter-Agency Task Force on Social and Solidarity Economy (UNTFSSE), after having chaired for the International Labour Organization the COPAC technical working group on cooperative statistics. She authored with colleagues many works, among which: Conceptual Framework for the Purpose of Measurement of Cooperatives and its Operationalization, published by International Labour Organization; The Worth of the Social Economy and The Weight of the Social Economy, an International Perspective, published with Peter Lang (Brussels); and Innovation in the Social Economy, the Québec Experience, with University of Toronto Press.

Session Chair

Julie Battilana

Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School, Alan L. Gleitsman Professor of Social Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School

Julie Battilana is the Joseph C. Wilson Professor of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior unit at Harvard Business School and the Alan L. Gleitsman Professor of Social Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is also the founder and faculty chair of the Social Innovation and Change Initiative. Her research examines the processes by which organizations and individuals initiate and implement changes that diverge from the taken-for-granted norms in a field of activity. The aim of her work is to elucidate what it takes to initiate divergent change, and how to succeed in its implementation. An important focus of her research is on social enterprises and how aspects of corporations and not-for-profits at their core can be sustainably combined.

Topic: ,,Beyond a Niche Approach: Could the Social Economy Become the Norm?„

Marthe Nyssens

Professor of Social Economy at UCLouvain and
President of the EMES Research Network

Marthe Nyssens is a full professor at the School of Economics of the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain, Belgium). She acts as the scientific coordinator, together with Jacques Defourny, of the “International Comparative Social Enterprise Models (ICSEM) Project”, which involves some 230 researchers from 55 countries in all world regions. She was a founding member and is currently the president of the EMES International Research Network. Her research work focuses on conceptual approaches to the third sector, both in developed and developing countries, as well as on the links between third-sector organisations and public policies. Her research deals with socio-economic logics of “not-for-profit organisations”; she analyses the role of these organisations and their relations with public policies, the market and civil society in fields such as work integration, care or the commons. She is member of GECES – Expert Group on Social Economy and Social Enterprises of the European Commission.

Topic: ,,The future of the social economy: The role of knowledge and networks in the development and support of the social economy„

Rocio Nogales-Muriel

Director of the EMES Research Network

Rocío Nogales-Muriel is the Managing Director of the EMES International Research Network since 2004. She coordinates the preparation and implementation of international research projects and conferences, PhD training schools and international partnerships as well as the network membership and communication. She was a member of the Experts Group on Social Enterprise of the European Commission (GECES) from 2013 to 2017 and currently represents EMES at the UNTFSSE. She obtained her PhD at the University of Barcelona on social innovation and the scaling-up strategies operating in cultural and artistic social enterprises. As a researcher, she focuses on social innovation, organizational transformation and the management strategies operating in third sector organizations, specifically in the cultural sector. She co-edits the book series “Routledge Studies in Social Enterprise & Social Innovation”.

Topic: ,,The future of the social economy: The role of knowledge and networks in the development and support of the social economy„

Rafael Chaves

Professor of Economic Policy and Social Economy at Universitat de Valencia,
Representation of CIRIEC-international at GECES

Rafael Chaves is Professor of Economic Policy and Social Economy at the Universitat de Valencia. He obtained a European Doctorate Laureate in Economics in 1995 and was Director of the Research Institute IUDESCOOP for ten years until he took on the position of Director of the Official Doctorate Program on Social Economics at the same university. He is President of the Scientific Commission on Social and Cooperative Economics of CIRIEC-international. His research has focused on public policies towards the third sector, major figures in the field of social economy, and definitions and theories on the third sector and social economy. He is member of GECES – Expert Group on Social Economy and Social Enterprises of the European Commission.

Topic: ,,Emerging needs and opportunities since the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath„

Mario Calderini

Professor of Social Innovation and Director of Tiresa at Politecnico di Milano

Mario Calderini is full Professor at Politecnico di Milano, School of Management, where he teaches Social Innovation. He is the Director of Tiresia, the Politecnico di Milano School of Management’s Research Centre for Impact Finance and Innovation. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Minister of University Research and Innovation. His research interests cover several topics in the field of innovation and social impact finance. He has been a member of the G8 Task Force for Social Impact Investment and chaired the Italian Advisory Board on Social Impact Finance. He sits in the Italian Government’s Advisory Group on Social Entrepreneurship and Impact Measurement and he contributed to promote the social innovation agenda in Italy.

Topic: ,,Envisioning the future of social economy as an agent of transformational change for inclusive growth„

Ruth Brännvall

CEO and Founder at Impact Invest – SIIN AB,
Social Innovation Researcher

Ruth Brännvall is CEO and founder of Impact Invest Scandinavia. She is a leading expert in the field of social innovation, social entrepreneurship and impact investing, having designed and run entrepreneurship programmes and social investment funds that have in total supported enterprises in more than 70 countries. She has a PhD in Industrial Economics and Management from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). Her area of research is innovation for underserved markets (i.e. poor, marginalised consumer groups in emerging markets as well as in Europe), often referred to as “social innovation”. Her focus is on the innovation processes and practices, the relationship between the entrepreneur/s and their end-users, and to what extent technology and innovation is originating or consumed in developing markets.

Topic: ,,Supporting social innovation in underserved markets – trends and areas of opportunities „

Xabier Goenaga Beldarrain

Head of Unit, Knowledge for Finance, Growth and Innovation, Joint Research Centre, European Commission (JRC)

Welcoming Remarks

Dominika Wruk

Assistant Professor for Sustainable Entrepreneurship, Institute for SME Research, University of Mannheim

Dominika Wruk is Assistant Professor for Sustainable Entrepreneurship at the Business School of the University of Mannheim. In her research, she studies the development of new organizational forms, their spread across organizational fields and their social, ecological and economic impact. One current focus in her work is the sharing and platform economy. Dominika explores the potential of cooperative organizational forms and new technologies in these fields.

Session Chair

Marieke Huysentruyt

Assistant Professor at the Strategy & Business Policy Department at HEC Paris

Marieke Huysentruyt is Assistant Professor at the Strategy & Business Policy Department at HEC Paris since January 2018. Her research and teaching concern the effectiveness of organizations at addressing today’s major societal challenges, like inequality and global warming. Her research focuses on the effects of personal values, organizational culture and management practices on firm productivity (drawing on both experimental evidence and large-scale, cross-country panel data on social enterprises). She investigated the role of individual intrinsic and extrinsic motives in influencing the performance of nascent social entrepreneurs and how empathy affects the success of corporate social initiatives. She has been a faculty member at the Stockholm School of Economics and London School of Economics, and a visiting scholar at Harvard University and the Sante Fe Institute.

Topic: ,,How to stimulate the development of sustainable business models for social entrepreneurs?“

Geoff Mulgan

Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London

Geoff Mulgan is Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation at University College London (UCL), starting in the spring of 2020. Prior to that he was Chief Executive of Nesta, the UK’s innovation foundation (an endowment which grew in worth to around £450m) between 2011 and the end of 2019. He has been a visiting professor at London School of Economics (LSE) and Melbourne University, a senior visiting scholar at Harvard University and President of the Innovation Design Department at the Italian University for Design (IAAD) in Turin. He has co-chaired a World Economic Forum group looking at innovation and entrepreneurship in the fourth industrial revolution.

Topic: ,,What can European social economy do to make the most of AI and the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and avoid being marginalised?“

Alex Nicholls

Professor in Social Entrepreneurship at University of Oxford

Alex Nicholls is the first tenured professor in social entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford. He is also a Tutorial Fellow and Member of the Governing Body at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, and in 2004, he was the first staff member of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship for which he helped raise the funding. His research interests range across several key areas within social entrepreneurship and social innovation, including: social and impact investment; the nexus of relationships between accounting, accountability, and governance; public and social policy contexts including impact bonds; and Fair Trade.

Topic: ,,How impact investing promotes social entrepreneurship: capitalizing social impact and the spectrum of impact finance„

Lisa Hehenberger

Assistant Professor in the department of Strategy and General Management and Director
of the Entrepreneurship Institute at ESADE

Lisa Hehenberger is an Assistant Professor at ESADE business school and Director of the ESADE Entrepreneurship Institute. She is a renowned expert on social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, impact investing and impact measurement. Her research focuses on market-building as an entrepreneurial project as well as on the entrepreneurial process in social entrepreneurship. She has published in the most prestigious academic peer-reviewed journals in management, such as the Academy of Management Journal, as well as in practitioner-oriented publications such as Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is the author of numerous books, policy papers and practitioner reports. Lisa is a member of the European Commission’s Expert Group on Social Business (GECES) and of the OECD’s Social Impact Investment Expert group. For six years, she was the Research and Policy Director of the European Venture Philanthropy Association (EVPA), the pan-European association for venture philanthropy and social impact investment EVPA, and now acts as a strategic advisor. She is the academic partner of the Spanish National Advisory Board on Impact Investing (Spain NAB) and previously served on the French National Advisory Board and the Impact Measurement Working Group of the Social Impact Investment Task Force established by the G8.

Topic: ,,From measuring to managing impact and learning for impact –
Approaches and learning journeys“