Christian Seelos

Christian is a Distinguished Fellow and Director of the Global Innovation for Impact Lab at the Stanford University Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Previously, he was the Director of Social Innovation Practice at Harvard Kennedy School’s Social Innovation for Change Initiative, an Academic Visitor at Oxford University’s Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship, the Leo Tindemans Chair for Business Model Innovation at KU Leuven, the Director of the IESE Platform for Strategy and Sustainability, and a faculty member of the Strategic Management Department at IESE Business School. Christian research on innovative business models in the context of deep poverty has been recognized by the Strategic Management Society (Best Paper Award for Practice Implications, 2007) and won the 2008 Gold Price of the IFC-FT research competition on private sector development. Together with Johanna Mair, he published the book "Innovation and Scaling for Impact; (Stanford University Press) for which he was awarded the 2017 Terry McAdam book prize for “the most inspirational and useful new book contributing to nonprofit management“, the 2018 ONE award for best book 2015-2017 by the Academy of Management, and the 2019 Virginia A. Hodgkinson Research Book Prize by ARNOVA and Independent Sector. In 2019, Christian was awarded Outstanding Social Innovation Thought Leader by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. In the 1980s and early 90s, Christian was an Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Cancer Research at the University of Vienna. He also held several management positions in the private industry. In the mid-1990s, he served as Senior Adviser to the Executive Chairman of UNSCOM and was awarded the Gold Medal for Peace for co-leading the disarmament efforts of Iraq’s biological weapons program. Christian is widely published in peer-reviewed journals in the natural- and social sciences as well as in various practice- and news-oriented formats.