Dr. Lisa Hehenberger ESADE Business School, Spain

Dr. Lisa Hehenberger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Strategy and General Management at ESADE Business School and Director of its Center for Social Impact. She is a renowned expert on social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, impact investment, and impact measurement.... read more

Dr. Hehenberger is the Chief Impact Advisor of Oryx Impact, a fund of funds investing in African impact funds, a member of the Board of Directors of the GSMA Foundation, and sits on the impact committees of Rubio Impact Ventures and Suma Capital. She is on the Scientific Board of the OECD Global Action "Promoting Social and Solidarity Economy Ecosystems", is a member of CNBC's Disruptor 50 Advisory Council, a group of leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship, and is a member of the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium set up by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. She sits on the advisory boards of impact investing fund Creas, as well as Seastainable Ventures and Lyfebulb.

Dr. Hehenberger served on the European Commission's Expert Group on Social Business (GECES) for almost ten years, and was a member of the OECD's Social Impact Investment Expert group. She was a member of the Academic Working Group on Impact Measurement and Management of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) that developed the Coursera course on the SDG Impact Standards. She has advised organizations such as World Wide Fund for Nature, Repsol Foundation, and Meridia Capital Partners on their impact investment strategies. For six years, she was the Research and Policy Director of the European Venture Philanthropy Association (EVPA), the pan-European association for venture philanthropy and social impact investment.

Dr. Hehenberger's research focuses on market building as an entrepreneurial project in the contexts of social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy, and impact investing. She is the author of numerous books, policy papers, and practitioner reports and has published in the most prestigious academic peer-reviewed journals in management, as well as in practitioner-oriented publications. She has served as advisor to the EU-funded research projects SEFORIS (social entrepreneurship for innovative and inclusive societies) and ITSSOIN (impact of the third sector as social innovation). Dr. Hehenberger launched the ESADE Center for Social Impact and set up ESADE's impact community and the Social Impact Lab of the MBA to connect ESADE students with the impact sector.

Dr. Hehenberger has a PhD in management from IESE Business School and a master's degree in business and economics from Stockholm School of Economics and HEC (CEMS). Previously, she worked in investment banking at Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) in London and at GB Investment Banking in Madrid and Barcelona.