Christian Seelos

Biography

Christian Seelos is Codirector of the Global Innovation for Impact Lab at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. Most recently he served as the Leo Tindemans Chair on Business Model Innovation at the Department of Economics and Business at KU Leuven (Belgium) and as the Director for Social Innovation Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Social Innovation for Change Initiative. Previous positions included academic visitor at the Skoll Center at Oxford University (UK), Director of the Platform for Strategy and Sustainability at the Strategic Management Department at IESE Business School (Spain), and Associate Professor at the Institute for Tumor Biology and Cancer research at the University of Vienna (Austria). He teaches MBA and executive courses in International Business, Global Strategic Management, Innovation Strategy, and Social Innovation and consults with various organizations in the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.
Christian’s research on innovative business models in the context of deep poverty was recognized by the Strategic Management Society (Best Paper Award for Practice Implications, 2007) and also won him the gold price, 2008 of the IFC-FT research competition on private sector development. Together with Johanna Mair, he recently published the book "Innovation and Scaling for Impact" by Stanford University Publishing that won the Terry McAdam Book Award 2017 for “the most inspirational and useful new book contributing to nonprofit management“, the 2018 Academy of Management ONE award for “best organizations book 2015-2017", and was nominated for the thinkers50 award 2017 in the category of innovation. Christian earned his PhD in Molecular Biology and is widely published in both the Natural- and Social Sciences. He also held management positions in the private industry and at the United Nations where he co-led the disarmament work of Iraq’s biological weapons.