Leena Lankoski

I have been working with questions of corporate responsibility and sustainability for more than 25 years, both in the private sector, at the United Nations, and lately in the academia. I have also carried out consulting work for several ministries as well as for the OECD. Currently I am a Senior University Lecturer in Sustainability in Business at Aalto University School of Business, holder of a Title of Docent in Corporate Responsibility at the University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Scholar at INSEAD Social Innovation Centre, France. I hold a D.Sc. in Industrial Engineering and Management from Aalto University as well as an MBA from Cass Business School, London.

During my years in this field I have looked at questions at the interface between business and society from a number of perspectives, ranging from strategies and competitiveness issues for single firms to macro-level and policy questions in a globalized economy. My academic publications examine topics such as the relationship between a firm’s sustainability performance and financial performance; the different meanings that ‘sustainability’ can take in a business context; the range of alternative objective functions that businesses may subscribe to; how stakeholders judge the value that businesses create or destroy for them; various aspects of sustainability in the food sector; and pathways to actual sustainability performance improvements in organizations.

At the moment I am working on projects that deal, for example, with how digitalization is changing the field of corporate responsibility; how consumer responsibility can be promoted as part of sustainability transitions in production-consumption systems; and how gamification may be used in the teaching of corporate responsibility and sustainability.

Teaching: Capstone in Creative Sustainability and Responsibility Management