Alex Nicholls

Biography

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