Julia Binder

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)