Florian Hoos is a Professor of Sustainability and ESG accounting at IMD. He is an award-winning teacher, innovator, and writer who was selected by Poets&Quants as one of “The World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40” in 2014. Before joining IMD, he served 10 years as faculty member at HEC Paris, where he directed the Master’s in Sustainability and Social Innovation program, and was a visiting assistant professor at MIT Sloan School. He also accumulated 10 years’ experience in leadership positions as managing director and entrepreneur with his own firm.
An accountant by training and impact innovator by experience, his work in academia and practice focuses on the challenges of triple-impact creation: making strong profits through integrating social and ecological aspects into business. The core of his work is helping organizations from startups to multinationals to execute strategies with measurable economic, social, and ecological impact. He has designed and directed customized programs for several large multinationals, helping them to innovate business models, internal processes, and incentive and reporting systems that prepare them for a future where sustainability is at the heart of the business.
Today, a company’s performance is assessed with a much stronger focus on sustainability than a decade ago. Consequently, companies need to measure their social and ecological impacts and explain how they increase profits and drive growth. Making this connection visible and manageable is key to gaining and maintaining competitive advantage.
Besides his academic positions, Hoos was Managing Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship of the Technical University in Berlin, where he managed an accelerator and makerspace and advised deep-tech and tech-for-impact startups with his team of 20+ people. He has advised a wide range of companies from startups to multinationals on their ESG strategy, sustainable innovation, and business model development. As a certified radical collaboration trainer, he currently helps executives navigate the triple-impact transformation to guarantee a successful implementation of sustainable company structures such as triple-impact reporting and incentive systems.
His work has been published in leading scientific journals including the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Management Accounting Research, and Accounting and Business Research. He is also a member of the editorial review board of Academy of Management Learning & Education and won one of the journal’s 2020 best reviewer awards for his academic services. Hoos was a pioneer of online education with courses on the coursera.com platform including his course Social Entrepreneurship and Changemaking for the first fully online master’s program at HEC Paris. Besides multiple awards for his teaching in executive programs and pedagogical innovations, he won the Best Professor Award of HEC Paris (Prix Vernimmen) in 2014.