IMD elea Center for Social Innovation

Political economy expert David Bach brings to IMD a proven track record of creating impactful learning journeys in a dual role as both Professor and Dean. 

Through his award-winning teaching and writing, Bach helps managers and senior executives develop a strategic lens for the nexus of business and politics. This enables them to more effectively navigate the myriad political challenges facing business, from corporate diplomacy and resurgent economic nationalism to stakeholder demands for greater sustainability and shaping policies for a post-COVID-19 world. His course “The End of Globalization?” – designed in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and the rise of populist leaders across Western democracies – received the 2018 Ideas Worth Teaching Award from the Aspen Institute. 

In January 2021, Bach will assume the role of Dean of Innovation and Programs at IMD and will lead efforts to enhance the school’s global reach and impact through both programmatic and pedagogical innovation.

“IMD faculty and expert staff already set the bar for real learning with real impact on our campuses in Lausanne and Singapore, and at client sites around the world. In keeping with our mission to ‘challenge what is and inspire what could be,’ my goal is for IMD to similarly become the reference point for digital design and delivery, and to be unrivalled in our ability to craft learning journeys for our clients that combine the best of in-person and online – reaching more leaders in more places more effectively and driving greater impact.”

Professor Bach is one of the main architects of the Global Network for Advanced Management, an alliance of 32 top global business schools from five continents, of which IMD has been a member since 2012. In his previous position at Yale School of Management, where he served as Deputy Dean, Bach led the successful expansion of the school’s degree program portfolio and the creation of Yale Center Beijing, which he oversaw until joining IMD.

Bach says that what drew him to IMD was the institution’s outstanding faculty, its innovative, global character, and a relentless focus on real impact. 

“I’m thrilled to be surrounded by such incredible colleagues who share IMD’s commitment to learning and impact,” reveals Professor Bach. “The opportunity to engage with leading executives from around the world on a daily basis, and to help them solve some of the most pressing problems confronting business and society, is an incredibly exciting opportunity.” 

Born and raised in Germany, Professor Bach completed his undergraduate studies at Yale and earned a PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Professor Bach is an avid skier and is trying to learn how to kite surf. He lives in Lausanne with his family.

Julia Binder specializes 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 new 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.

While companies are often denounced as being part of the sustainability problem, Binder believes that seizing their size and scale to achieve positive impact is likely to be one of the decisive factors in our collective efforts to halt environmental degradation and reduce social inequalities.

She is particularly interested in new business models that have the potential to transform our economic system by putting humans and the natural environment at the heart of the organization.

In this work she draws inspiration from sustainable entrepreneurs, who seek to radically change entire industries and create truly holistic and inclusive organizations. Sustainable entrepreneurs engage in radical leadership, question and rethink common practices and procedures, and envision and implement bold new ideas that seem impossible to others. Instead of aiming for a competitive advantage and profit maximization, they are joining forces with all possible stakeholders to co-create, co-execute, and co-impact for a sustainable future, she says.

Binder received her PhD summa cum laude from the Technical University of Munich for her thesis on sustainable entrepreneurship, and she continues to research the topic at IMD. She has discovered that sustainable entrepreneurs display psychological traits that could help other executives learn how to reframe problems so that they can better identify solutions. "From the studies with the entrepreneurs we found they are looking at these problems through different lenses and by doing that they are coming up with non-obvious, interesting and insightful solutions to the biggest challenges of our times," she says.

She also focuses on processes and approaches that are being piloted by sustainable entrepreneurs – such as new work structures with unlimited vacations, and strategies that equally weight social and environmental issues with profit – to see how they could be implemented at larger organizations to enable them to stay relevant in the future.

The Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business led by Binder also aims to support leaders and companies who are keen to take steps towards a more sustainable and inclusive business world, by

harnessing IMD's knowledge and expertise in the area and offering tools to help them deliver systemic, innovative and impactful responses.

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

Prior to joining IMD in 2021, Binder was Deputy to the Vice President for Innovation at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and led the school’s sustainability initiative Tech4Impact. In this role she established a multi-stakeholder platform bringing together actors from academia, business, NGOs, governments and civil society to realize innovative and entrepreneurial solutions with potential to achieve sustainable impact. She also served as Chair of the Swiss Space Center.

Selected publications

Getting more from many—A framework of community resourcefulness in new venture creation (Journal of Business Venturing, 2021)

I am what I pledge: The importance of value alignment for mobilizing backers in reward-based crowdfunding (Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 2021)

Painting with all the colors: The value of social identity theory for understanding social entrepreneurship (Academy of Management Review, 2019)

Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions (Journal of Business Venturing, 2019)

Recognition

Named on Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the coming year (2022)

World Open Innovation Conference Best Emerging Scholar Paper Award (2019)

Bavarian Culture Prize for best PhD thesis (2017)

Best Case Study in oikos Case Writing Competition social entrepreneurship track (2016)

Education

Bachelor's degree (Marketing and Communication)

IMK Wiesbaden

MSc (Marketing)

University of Edinburgh

PhD (Entrepreneurship/Entrepreneurial Studies)

Technische Universität München

Arnaud Chevallier helps executives solve complex problems and make better decisions under uncertainty. His research, teaching and consulting draw on empirical findings from diverse disciplines to provide concrete tools that prepare executives to manage the strategic challenges they face in today’s dynamic global marketplace.

Effective problem solvers are T-shaped – they are both generalists and specialists, combining depth and breadth of knowledge. Although traditional education and training cultivate specialist skills, they pay much less attention to the acquisition of generalist skills, including strategic thinking. Executives can use Chevallier’s tools to improve on the breadth dimension.

His initial 2016 book Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving, published by Oxford University Press, is now followed by his latest title, Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems, co-authored with Albrecht Enders. This book synthesizes the strategic thinking needed for complex problem solving into a simple three-step process: frame, explore, decide. It also shows practitioners how to follow these steps using highly applicable, concrete tools.

He has helped numerous organizations to identify breakthrough solutions to complex problems, including Shell, SAP, Lenovo, Cisco, Novo Nordisk, Statkraft and the United Nations. He recently helped the International Committee of the Red Cross identify innovative funding sources and assisted Gavi the Vaccine Alliance in its drive to have greater impact. He also helped Swiss company Agathon to make decisions under high uncertainty during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and supported Tetra Pak in improving its decision-making processes through the optimal engagement of stakeholders.

At IMD he is Director of the Global Management Foundations (GMF) program and the Master of Science in Sustainable Management and Technology (SMT) program offered jointly by IMD, the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), and the University of Lausanne. He is also Co-Director of IMD’s Complex Problem Solving (CPS) program.

Before joining IMD in 2018, Chevallier served as Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he taught strategic thinking in the engineering school. He was previously graduate dean of the University of Monterrey in Mexico, teaching engineering and business. He trained in mechanical engineering and his PhD from Rice focused on nonlinear stochastic mechanics. He then worked in Accenture’s strategy and business architecture division before joining academia.

Selected publications

Don’t let the AI hype undermine good decision making (Management and Business Review, 2022 forthcoming)

Solvable: A Simple Solution to Complex Problems (Pearson, 2022 forthcoming)

Strategic Thinking in Complex Problem Solving (Oxford University Press, 2016)

Oil and gas well drilling: A vibrations perspective (The Shock and Vibration Digest, 2003)

Nonlinear stochastic drill-string vibrations (The Journal of Vibration and Acoustics, 2002)

Education

BS (Mechanical Engineering)

Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

MS (Mechanical Engineering)

Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines

MS (Mechanical Engineering)

Rice University

PhD (Mechanical Engineering)

Rice University

Frédéric Dalsace focuses on two distinct areas – B2B issues such as customer centricity, buyer-seller relationships, and value management, and sustainability, inclusive business models, and alleviating poverty.

He is Co-Director of IMD’s new Leading Customer-Centric Strategies (LCCS) program and believes that companies need to rethink their approach to customer centricity. He says many organizations only consider customer centricity when they are defining their offers, but that they also need to incorporate it into the value delivery and value capture dimensions of their business models. One way of doing this is through risk-sharing business models including fully service-based offerings, such as Rolls Royce's Power by the Hour model, or performance-based and outcome-based contracts in which payments depend on the value created, with the result that the interests of suppliers and customers are aligned.

Risk-sharing business models are also relevant in Dalsace’s work on sustainability because they lead to more circular and more efficient solutions. He previously worked with 2006 Nobel prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus on inclusive business models, and is currently helping firms to integrate sustainability into their broader strategy by making the business case for sustainability, for example. Many companies have been naive about sustainability and have made the mistake of decoupling it from their overall strategy, he says.

He is also collaborating with IMD’s Professor of Strategy Arnaud Chevallier on a project to identify and evaluate the types of questions that leaders should be asking of those around them. As this is not something that is formally taught, leaders tend to learn by doing, which can lead to blind spots. Using a database of more than 600 executives, the pair have therefore developed a template for the types of questions that leaders need to ask – and how to ask them.

Dalsace has worked with a range of firms including Atlas Copco, UCB, Valmet, VAT Group, Grundfos, MANE, Porsche and STADA, and he has published in academic journals such as Harvard Business Review, Business Horizons, Strategic Management Journal and Revue Française de Gestion.

Before joining IMD in 2019, he was a Professor at HEC Paris for 16 years, holding the Social Business/Enterprise and Poverty Chair, and he has won numerous awards for his teaching, research, and publications.

Prior to his academic life, he held a series of senior positions in the business world, including marketing roles at Michelin and CarnaudMetalbox and as a strategy consultant with McKinsey.

Selected publications

Mindset drives success: Selling beneficial products at the base of the pyramid (Business Horizons, 2021)

The friend or foe fallacy: Why your best customers may not need your friendship (Business Horizons, 2017)

Reaching the rich world’s poorest consumers (Harvard Business Review, 2015)

Do make or buy decisions matter? The influence of organizational governance on technological performance (Strategic Management Journal, 2002)

L’entreprise contre la pauvreté (Fondation Jean Jaurès, 2011)

Recognition

HEC Montreal CSR Challenge Case Writing Competition Award (2022)

Named on Case Centre list of best-selling cases (2021)

Strategy Management Society (Strategy Process Interest Group) Best Paper Prize (2019)

Business Horizons Best Article Award (2017)

Named on Poets & Quants list of MBA graduates’ favorite professors (2017)

HEC Paris MBA Program Best Permanent Professor (Specialized Phase) (2016, 2017)

Case Centre Award for Best Marketing Case (2015)

Best Teacher Award, HEC (2006)

HEC Foundation Prize for best article published by HEC Faculty (2004)

Winner of Institute for the Study of Business Markets Doctoral Competition (2000)

Education

MSc (Business Administration)

HEC Paris

MBA

Harvard Business School

MSc (Management)

INSEAD

PhD (Management)

INSEAD

Stéphane JG Girod’s research, teaching, and consulting focus on the development of business agility in response to the many forms of disruption faced by organizations in today’s world. He sets out his thinking on the topic in his recent book Resetting Management: Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty. He has particular expertise in the luxury sectors and leads IMD’s Luxury 2050 initiative.

Girod helps executives and established companies to foster agility at the strategy, organizational, and leadership levels in response to digital, (de)globalization, and other forms of disruption. He is an expert on linking agility and digital transformations.

In Resetting Management: Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty, he explains why business agility now matters more than ever and shows how it can release a new level of energy, innovation, and entrepreneurship that will enable organizations to be future ready. Rather than advocating a formulaic one-size-fits-all approach, the book outlines pathways towards calibrating the right type and degree of agility for every company’s unique circumstances.

Agility is particularly important in the luxury sectors, which are experiencing multiple rupture points. The IMD Luxury 2050 initiative is a platform offering solutions to help luxury brands prepare today for the longer-run, big, strategic, operational, and cultural challenges they face. These solutions bring together IMD’s unique competences in terms of dedicated innovative pedagogical activities, cutting-edge thought leadership, and access to a vibrant community of alumni working across a wide range of luxury industries.

Girod’s work in the luxury space is increasingly focused on helping luxury brands develop and implement purposeful and sustainable strategies. In addition, he works on business agility across a range of other sectors including retail, automobile, pharmaceuticals, and banking, and he has designed customized learning journeys for numerous organizations who appreciate his hands-on approach and ability to keep sight of the bigger picture while also paying attention to detail. He has directed programs for Richemont, Puig, Mazda, Telenor, Midea, Bally, and La Prairie and has taught on custom programs for many others.

He is also Director of IMD’s Reinventing Luxury Lab open program and Co-Director of the Digital Execution course.

His research has appeared in leading journals such as Harvard Business Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Long Range Planning, the Journal of Business Strategy, and European Business Review, and he is co-editor of a California Management Review special issue on business agility which is due to be published in 2023.

Girod writes a regular column in Forbes on disruption, innovation, and agility in luxury industries, and his thought leadership has been covered by media outlets such as China Daily, The Economist Intelligence Unit, Women’s Wear Daily, BBC News, Télévision Suisse Romande, Valor Econômico, La Vanguardia, Tribune de Genève, Luxury Society, HandelZeitung, and The Times. He is also the author of numerous case studies, including ones on Rabobank (agile leadership), Lamborghini (future-readiness and transformation), Chanel, and Chloé (both on sustainability).

Before joining IMD in 2016, he was Assistant Professor of International Business and Strategy at Henley Business School and a Manager of the Accenture Institute for High Performance in London. He previously occupied several international development roles in leading luxury goods companies for markets such as France, Italy, and the Middle East and speaks seven languages.

Selected publications

Five strategies for building a new-style luxury customer community (Forbes, 2022)

[email protected]: Agile leadership at Rabobank (IMD, 2022)

Chanel 1.5°: A sustainability journey (IMD, 2021)

Resetting Management: Thrive with Agility in the Age of Uncertainty (Kogan Page, 2021)

How organizations can design for agility and embrace uncertainty (strategy+business, 2021)

How luxury brands can beat counterfeiters (Harvard Business Review, 2019)

Restructure or reconfigure? (Harvard Business Review, 2017)

Education

MSc (Business & Management)

Toulouse Business School

MBA (International Business and Management)

Helsinki School of Economics, Aalto University

MSc (Management Research and Business Administration)

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

DPhil (Strategic Management)

Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Knut Haanaes' research and teaching focus on strategy, sustainability, strategic renewal and business models. He says these different pillars enable him to help companies think about their path for the future and take account of new trends like demands for greater sustainability.

Sustainability now plays an important part in his work. He was the driving force behind the creation of the Business Schools for Climate Leadership (BS4CL) alliance of eight leading European business schools, which was launched in 2021 to address the climate crisis. The schools plan to collaborate on research to identify and shape best practices and work across industries to accelerate the business community’s response to climate change, and Haanaes continues to play a leading role in the group’s activities.

He is also deeply involved in IMD's strategic partnership with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), which aims to equip business leaders with the skills to accelerate the pace of sustainable business transformation and create the most sustainability-centered MBA program in the world.

At IMD, Haanaes is Director of the Leading Sustainable Business Transformation (LSBT) program and Co-Director of Driving Sustainability from the Boardroom (DSB), a program developed as part of IMD’s collaboration with WBCSD. He is also head of the sustainability stream in the MBA program and teaches in many of the school's key open programs, including the Advanced Management Program (AMP), Breakthrough Program for Senior Executives (BPSE) and Orchestrating Winning Performance (OWP).

Through his work with clients, Haanaes has also accumulated extensive experience in a number of industries on issues of strategy. He believes that the secret to creating lasting, impactful companies is to find a balance between doing what you're good at (exploitation) and looking for new challenges to take on (exploration).

At IMD, he has helped run custom programs for Neste, CMS, Technip FMC, Coca-Cola Bottling, Mondelez, Maybank, Rio Tinto and Iberdrola.

Haanaes’ teaching on strategy is underpinned by his best-selling book Your Strategy Needs a Strategy. The book won praise from the likes of World Economic Forum founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Ian C. Read and Benetton CEO Marco Airoldi after being published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015 and it has since been translated into seven other languages.

He is also a successful TED speaker. His TED talk "Two reasons companies fail – and how to avoid them" has attracted more than 2 million views.

Haanaes has published articles in top publications such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review and research reports for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), The World Economic Forum and MIT.

He joined IMD in 2016 from BCG, where he was a Senior Partner and Global Leader of the Strategy Practice. He also led BCG’s collaboration with MIT on sustainability, developing one of the largest databases globally of how executives address the topic, and founded the BCG global sustainability initiative.

Haanaes was Dean of the Global Leadership Institute at the World Economic Forum between 2018 and 2020. He is also a member of the CEO’s Sustainability Advisory Board at Carlsberg, and he previously served as Chairman of BI Norwegian Business School, a member of the Global Agenda Council on New Economic Growth Models at the World Economic Forum, Executive Director of the Research Council of Norway and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. 

Selected publications

Business schools must do more on climate change (Harvard Business Review, 2022)

How the university of the future must adapt to train future leaders (Forbes, 2020).

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015)

Making sustainability profitable (Harvard Business Review, 2013)

How serious is climate change to business? (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2013).

Sustainability as adaptability (Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 2012)

Sustainability nears a tipping point (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2012).

New sustainability study: The 'embracers' seize advantage (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2011)

Recognition

President’s Award, BCG

Expansion Management Review Best Article

BI Norwegian Business School best lecturer prize

Education

MSc (Economics)

Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration (NHH)

PhD (Strategy)

Copenhagen Business School

Alyson Meister helps organizations to develop inclusive and resilient leaders, teams, and workplaces. Her research specialty includes topics surrounding identity and diversity as well as workplace stress, mental health, and wellbeing. Meister was named on the Thinkers50 Radar list in 2021 and subsequently nominated for a Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award.

Her inclusion on the Thinkers50 Radar list was in recognition of her research on how people can navigate, manage, and overcome bias throughout their careers, and how feeling marginalized, stereotyped, or mislabeled impacts stress, wellbeing, and job performance. Diversity and inclusion are an important strand of her work with leaders, who Meister says need to examine how their identity and core values shape not only their own self-perceptions, beliefs, and behavior, but also how they perceive, label, and interact with others.

Her shortlisting for the 2021 Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award was closely linked to her research on leader origin stories. This work explored the personal stories of 92 leaders to shed light on how the stories people hold onto and tell others shape their leadership motivations and behaviors, and how this differs for men and women.

Her practitioner articles regularly appear in Harvard Business Review and I by IMD, and her research has been published in influential management journals such as the Academy of Management Review, Journal of Management, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Human Relations, Journal of Management Studies and Leadership Quarterly.

Meister leads IMD’s Future Leaders program and has coached thousands of executives, teams and organizations across a broad range of industries, from mining and engineering through to professional services and technology, working with clients such as Lenovo, Maersk, Julius Baer, Sandvik, CMS, BHP Billiton, LEGO Group, Hilti and Cisco.

Additionally she Chairs the Scientific Advisory Council for One Mind at Work, a not-for-profit that focuses on advancing mental health in the workplace, and serves on the editorial board of the Academy of Management Review.

Canadian-born Meister has lived and worked on five continents – North and South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia – and describes herself as a “global nomad”. Having had a wealth of practical experience before entering academia, she joined IMD as a professor in 2019 after previously working as Assistant Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. 

Selected publications

The science of choking under pressure (Harvard Business Review, 2022)

Athletes are shifting the narrative around mental health at work (Harvard Business Review, 2021)

Staying mindful when you’re working remotely (Harvard Business Review, 2021)

Is your organization digging trenches or building bridges? (Harvard Business Review, 2021)

Now you see me, now you don’t: A conceptual model of the antecedents and consequences of leader impostorism (Journal of Management, 2021)

What’s your leadership origin story? (Harvard Business Review, 2020)

The stories that make us: Leaders’ origin stories and temporal identity work (Human Relations, 2020)

Toward a temporal theory of faultlines and subgroup entrenchment (Journal of Management Studies, 2019)

Identities under scrutiny: How women leaders navigate feeling misidentified at work (The Leadership Quarterly, 2017)

Feeling misidentified: The consequences of internal identity asymmetries for individuals at work (Academy of Management Review, 2014)

Recognition

Named on Thinkers50 Radar list of management thinkers to watch in the coming year (2021)

Nominated for Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Award (2021)

Education

Honors Degree in Business Administration

Ivey Business School, University of Western Ontario, Canada

PhD in Management (Organizational Behavior)

Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, Australia

Phil Rosenzweig is a Professor of Strategy and international Management. He is Co-director of Transition to Business Leadership, and was also Co-Director of the Dual Executive MBA Program with CKGSB.

Professor Rosenzweig's areas of expertise include strategy, firm performance, and complex organization design. He has written on the management of multinational firms, with articles published in Strategic Management Journal, Journal of International Business Studies, Academy of Management Review, Management Science, and California Management Review. He is also author of numerous case studies on firms including Microsoft, Daimler Benz, Matsushita, Heineken, Accor, MTN, Dubai Aluminium, and Vodafone.

More recently, Phil Rosenzweig has focused his attention on critical thinking and managerial decision making. His 2007 book, The Halo Effect and the Eight Other Business Delusions that Deceive Managers, takes a critical look at the errors that pervade much business thinking. It was named Best Business Book of the Year by get Abstracts, and was favorably reviewed in Harvard Business Review, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines. It has been translated into 14 languages. His 2014 book, Left Brain, Right Stuff: How Leaders Make Winning Decisions, extends research about decision making into the world of strategy and management.

Drawing on more than 30 years of business and academic experience, Professor Rosenzweig has consulted with numerous firms in Europe and North America, and has taught executive courses in North America, South America, Europe, Japan, Singapore, and the Middle East. Most recently he has worked closely with CKGSB regarding China and Chinese management.

Prior to joining IMD, Phil Rosenzweig was assistant professor at Harvard Business School from 1990 to 1996. In addition to his academic experience, he worked with Hewlett-Packard Company in California from 1979 to 1986. He received his PhD from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in 1990; MBA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1980; BA in economics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976.

Karl Schmedders' research and teaching currently focus on sustainability and the economics of climate change. He is therefore able to provide key insights on the transition risk arising from the shift to a greener economy and help companies face up to the challenges of potential asset degradation and increasing carbon prices.

He says finance and economics offer many tools to combat climate change, and the power of incentives and markets can be employed to make progress, and argues that businesses and consumers need to take a leading role in the search for solutions to the climate crisis, and not just wait for governments and policy makers to introduce climate change mitigation and adaptation measures.

Schmedders is passionate about the importance of a "just transition" in which no one loses out as a result of action to tackle climate change. He believes that more attention needs to be paid to the S and G elements of the ESG (environmental, social and governance) equation, to ensure that action on the environmental component does not adversely affect poor people and those living in developing countries. In his view, humanity will fail in its fight against climate change and global warming if it does not also address inequality and ensure a just transition.

His expertise in computational methods in finance means that he is able to apply numerical solution techniques to complex economic and financial models and shed light on a range of topical market issues and industry problems for organizations. He was Director of IMD’s custom program for Malaysian bank Maybank and has worked with a range of clients such as ABB, Airbus, Eneva, Evonik, Orkla and Julius Bär.

He is also Director of IMD’s new online certification course for structured investment products in partnership with Swiss company Leonteq, teaches in the Advanced Management Concepts (AMC) and Executive MBA programs, and is an advisor on International Consulting Projects in the MBA program.

He has published numerous research articles in international academic journals such as Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Financial Economics, Journal of Finance, Review of Financial Studies, Management Science and Operations Research.

Before joining IMD in 2019, Schmedders was Professor of Quantitative Business Administration at the University in Zurich and Associate Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He received his PhD from Stanford University and received several teaching awards from both Stanford and Kellogg.

He remains a Visiting Professor of Executive MBA Education at Kellogg School of Management and is a board member of Swiss firms LPX Group and SYLVA AG. He is also a fellow of the Game Theory Society.

Selected publications

A large-scale optimization model for replicating portfolios in the life insurance industry (Operations Research, 2021)

Asset pricing with heterogeneous agents and long-run risk (Journal of Financial Economics, 2021)

What managers need to know about data exchanges (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2020)

Higher-order effects in asset-pricing models with long-run risk (Journal of Finance, 2018)

Optimal and naive diversification in currency markets (Management Science, 2017)

A polynomial optimization approach to principal agent problems (Econometrica, 2015)

Bond ladders and optimal portfolios (Review of Financial Studies, 2011)

On price caps under uncertainty (Review of Economic Studies, 2007)

Recognition

Kellogg-HKUST EMBA program Best Faculty Award (2017)

Kellogg-WHU EMBA program Best Teacher Award (2008, 2009, 2011-2015, 2017, 2019)

Rochester-Bern EMBA program Superior Teaching Award (2014 and 2016)

Kellogg-Recanati EMBA program Best Teacher Award (2014)

Kellogg EMBA program Outstanding Professor Award (2009, 2011-2013, 2015)

WHU Koblenz Best Teacher Award (2002-2004)

L.G. Lavengood Professor of the Year, Kellogg School of Management (2002)

Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford University (1996)

Education

MS (Operations Research)

Stanford University

PhD (Operations Research)

Stanford University