Julia Binder

Julia Binder is the Professor of Sustainable Innovation and Business Transformation at IMD, the International Institute for Management Development.

Specialising in the intersection between sustainability and innovation, her research and teaching explore the processes, strategies, and mechanisms that allow entrepreneurs and managers to combine economic, social, and environmental impact in their businesses. As Director of IMD’s Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business, she aims to help business leaders find radical and innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges of our time. Her work on how sustainable entrepreneurs could provide a blueprint for other business leaders led to her being named on the 2022 Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the coming year.

Dr. Binder’s research has been published in the Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Academy of Management Review, and she teaches on IMD’s Transition to Business Leadership (TBL) and Digital Marketing Strategies (DMS) programs as well as organising its MBA Innovation Week.

Previously, Dr. Binder was the Deputy of the Vice President for Innovation and Head of Tech4Impact at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), where her work focused on questions such as: How do businesses have to change to move towards a more sustainable society? What is the role of technology in this journey? And under which conditions can entrepreneurs scale their impact? Besides exploring such questions in her research, she also implemented concrete solutions to address these issues in her role at EPFL’s Tech4Impact initiative. In this role she established a multi-stakeholder platform bringing together actors from academia, business, NGOs, governments, and civil society to realise innovative and entrepreneurial solutions with potential to achieve sustainable impact. She also served as Chair of the Swiss Space Center.

Julia began her work at EPFL as a postdoctoral researcher after obtaining her PhD (summa cum laude) in sustainable entrepreneurship at the Technische Universität München, for which she received the Bavarian Culture Prize.