IMD Business School is pleased to announce that Julia Binder will join the school’s campus in Lausanne, Switzerland on September 1st, 2021 as Professor of Sustainable Innovation and Business Transformation. Julia’s expertise includes teaching and researching sustainability in organizations, with a focus on sustainable innovation, entrepreneurship, and marketing. She enjoys exploring the processes, strategies, and mechanisms that allow entrepreneurs and managers to combine economic, social, and environmental impact in initiating and transforming their businesses.
“We look forward to Julia joining the IMD faculty. Her scholarship in the area of sustainability and entrepreneurship is rigorous and insightful. She has taught courses on sustainability innovation and corporate entrepreneurship, topics of great relevance to the IMD ecosystem. She comes with great reputation for building key stakeholder relationships in the dissemination of technology and management capabilities at EPFL. Her abilities and her sense of enthusiasm for IMD’s vision makes her a great addition to our faculty,” said IMD’s Dean of Faculty Research, Anand Narasimhan.
Julia received her PhD summa cum laude on her thesis on sustainable entrepreneurship from the Technical University of Munich. Prior to joining IMD, Julia was Deputy to the Vice President for Innovation at EPFL and led the school’s sustainability initiative Tech4Impact. In this role she has established a multi-stakeholder platform bringing together actors from academia, business, NGO’s, governments, and the civil society to realize innovative and entrepreneurial solutions that have the potential to achieve sustainable impact.
At EPFL, she taught courses on sustainable entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship & new venture strategy. She also facilitated workshops for senior executives on technologies for impact and corporate sustainable transformations. Prior to EPFL, Julia taught courses on sustainability innovation & marketing and corporate entrepreneurship. Her research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice, and Academy of Management Review.
Julia’s awards include the Bavarian Culture Prize for the Best PhD thesis in 2017, the Best Emerging Scholar Paper Award at the World Open Innovation Conference 2019 and the Best Case Study in the social entrepreneurship track of the oikos teaching case writing competition 2016.
