The Future of Philanthropy
Speakers
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Alex 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.
Alex's 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.
To date, Nicholls has published over a hundred papers, working papers, book chapters and articles, and six books. Most appear in a wide range of peer reviewed journals and books, including seven papers in Financial Times Top 30 journals. His 2009 paper on social investment won the Best Paper Award (Entrepreneurship) at the British Academy of Management. In 2010, Nicholls edited a Special Edition of Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice on social entrepreneurship – the first time a top tier management journal had recognised the topic in this way. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.
Nicholls is the co-author of a major research book on Fair Trade (with Charlotte Opal, Sage, 2005) and the editor of the first scholarly collection of papers on social entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2006, 2008). Both represent the best selling and most cited academic books on their subjects in the world. In 2011, Nicholls published a co-edited volume on social innovation – again, the first scholarly book on the subject. In 2015, he published a further co-edited volume on social finance and a new book on social innovation with NESTA. In 2019, Nicholls will publish a book examining the economic underpinnings of social innovation in the European Union (based upon a four year, 4 million Euro, EU funded research project for which he was the Principle Investigator: CRESSI). Nicholl's next book project will be a monograph on the politics of social entrepreneurship and innovation globally. His books have been translated into several languages and are the most cited works on each of their subjects.
Nicholls has held lectureships at a wide variety of academic institutions including: University of Toronto, Canada; Leeds Metropolitan University; University of Surrey; Aston Business School and the University of Oxford. He has been a Fellow of the Academy of Marketing Science and a Member of the Institute of Learning and Teaching. Nicholls also sat on the regional social enterprise expert group for the South East of England and is a member of the Advisory Group for the ESRC Social Enterprise Capacity Building Cluster. He has been an Honorary Fellow at the Third Sector Research Centre at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Impact, University of New South Wales. Prior to returning to academic life, Nicholls held senior management positions at the John Lewis Partnership, the largest mutual retailer in Europe, and he currently sits of the Board of several social enterprises.
Alex earned a BA (Hons), MA and PhD in English Language and Literature from King’s College, London and an MBA from Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.
Expertise:
Social entrepreneurship
Social innovation
Impact Investing
Social Impact Bonds
Social accounting
Public and social policy contexts of social innovation
Fair Trade
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Founder and Director , UCLA Center for Civil Society
Helmut K. Anheier is an academic currently serving as Dean of the Hertie School of Governance. His research interests include methodological questions of sociological research with different units of analysis, organizational theory and the interaction of globalisation and civil society more broadly. Anheier was educated at the University of Trier in Germany and at Yale, and after completing a PhD in 1986 based on 15 month of field work in West Africa for data gathering. Dr. Anheier worked in the late 1980s as a social affairs officer at the United Nations. His academic career included posts at Rutgers and the London School of Economics, where Anheier held a Centennial Professorship[5] and founded and directed the Centre for Civil Society; he then moved to UCLA where he established the Center for Civil Society. From the year 2000 on he published several articles and encyclopedia entries about the normative dimension of "civil" society as an anlytical concept for sociological investigations and re-introduced the notion of "civility". At UCLA he was from 2001 - 2009 Professor of Public Policy and Social Welfare. Anheier is today chair of Sociology at Heidelberg University and Academic Director of the Center for Social Investment at the same University.
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Director, Center for Civil Society Studies at The Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies
Lester M. Salamon is a professor at The Johns Hopkins University. He is also the Director of the Center for Civil Society Studies at The Johns Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. Salamon has written or edited over 20 books in addition to hundreds of articles, monographs and chapters that have appeared in Foreign Affairs, the New York Times, Voluntas, and numerous other publications. He was a pioneer in the empirical study of the nonprofit sector in the United States, and is considered by many experts in his field to be a leading specialist on alternative tools of government action and on the nonprofit sector in the U.S. and around the world.
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Managing Director, FSG, FSG, Inc.
Mark Kramer is a leading researcher, writer, speaker and consultant on strategies for social impact. He is best known as the co-author of seminal articles on Creating Shared Value, Collective Impact, and Catalytic Philanthropy. He has also written extensively on impact investing, systems change, and strategic evaluation. His most recent research is on moving beyond ESG by communicating the economic value of corporate social impact to investors.
Mark co-founded FSG with Professor Michael Porter and serves as a Managing Director of the 150-person global social impact consulting firm. FSG also supports three communities of practice: the Shared Value Initiative, the Collective Impact Forum and Talent Rewire.
Mark is also a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School, a member of the Aspen Philanthropy Group, and an advisor to Nestle and Kimberly-Clark. Prieviously, Mark served as President of the private equity firm Kramer Capital Management. He holds a BA from Brandeis University, MBA from The Wharton School, and JD from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
