Julia Binder
Julia Binder
Julia Binder

Professor of Sustainable Innovation and Business Transformation

Julia Binder is Professor of Sustainable Innovation and Business Transformation. She 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 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, she says, 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.

Businesses have the power to shape a sustainable future, yet to enable such profound transformations they themselves need to change – and it is no exaggeration to say that this transformation is by far the biggest organizational challenge of our time.

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 studies with 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 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
Article
Getting more from many—A framework of community resourcefulness in new venture creation
In this study, we move beyond the predominant focus entrepreneurship researchers have put on the acquisition of financial capital from professional investors by exploring how, and with what effects...
Published 1 May 2021
Article
I am what I pledge: The importance of value alignment for mobilizing backers in reward-based crowdfunding
Crowdfunding has emerged as an important alternative financing tool for entrepreneurs. Extant research on the antecedents of crowdfunding success have produced divergent results. By applying the cr...
Published 1 May 2021
Article
Painting with all the colors: The value of social identity theory for understanding social entrepreneurship
Building on the emerging body of research on founder identity, Wry and York (2017) elaborate how an identity-based approach has the potential to extend our knowledge of opportunity identification i...
Published 3 January 2019
Article
Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions
Experimental methods provide important advantages for advancing academic understanding of entrepreneurship. Yet, the complex and comingled relationships between some of entrepreneurship's key chara...
Published 1 March 2019
Academic publications
Article
I am what I pledge: The importance of value alignment for mobilizing backers in reward-based crowdfunding
Crowdfunding has emerged as an important alternative financing tool for entrepreneurs. Extant research on the antecedents of crowdfunding success have produced divergent results. By applying the cr...
Published 1 May 2021
Article
Getting more from many—A framework of community resourcefulness in new venture creation
In this study, we move beyond the predominant focus entrepreneurship researchers have put on the acquisition of financial capital from professional investors by exploring how, and with what effects...
Published 1 May 2021
Article
Painting with all the colors: The value of social identity theory for understanding social entrepreneurship
Building on the emerging body of research on founder identity, Wry and York (2017) elaborate how an identity-based approach has the potential to extend our knowledge of opportunity identification i...
Published 3 January 2019
Article
Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions
Experimental methods provide important advantages for advancing academic understanding of entrepreneurship. Yet, the complex and comingled relationships between some of entrepreneurship's key chara...
Published 1 March 2019
Article
Sustainable entrepreneurship : A convergent process model
Sustainable entrepreneurship pursues a triple bottom line approach of economic, social and ecological goals. The main aim of this paper is to add to our understanding of the process of sustainable ...
Published 1 January 2017
Insight for Executives
Let’s be clear: ESG is not ‘woke’ and it’s different from sustainability
Article
Let’s be clear: ESG is not ‘woke’ and it’s different from sustainability
In the second of a series of practical guides for organizations on sustainability, Julia Binder, Director of IMD’s Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business, explains the important distinction ...
Published 3 February 2023
Financing the next generation of entrepreneurs
Article
Financing the next generation of entrepreneurs
Investors and entrepreneurs need to build personal relationships to collectively drive innovation
Published 9 May 2022
Skyrocketing energy costs make decarbonization a business imperative
Article
Skyrocketing energy costs make decarbonization a business imperative
Soaring oil and gas prices are a major challenge for businesses, but the energy crisis is creating new economic opportunities as well
Published 6 May 2022
Musk’s Twitter deal risks becoming a costly distraction for Tesla
Article
Musk’s Twitter deal risks becoming a costly distraction for Tesla
The billionaire will have his hands full managing a sprawling portfolio with few investment synergies .
Published 30 April 2022
Opting out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Why businesses are fighting consumerism
Article
Opting out of Black Friday and Cyber Monday: Why businesses are fighting consumerism
Do consumer incentives have negative consequences on people and planet? Julia Binder, Professor of Sustainable Innovation and Business Transformation at IMD, explores the risks.
Published 29 November 2021
Report
Business schools for climate leadership
CHAPTER 5 (IMD contribution) Climate change and Business Transformation: As we act to mitigate and adapt to climate change, we are undergoing the biggest business transformation the world has ever ...
Published 10 November 2021
How entrepreneurs are preparing the ground for a regenerative economy
Article
How entrepreneurs are preparing the ground for a regenerative economy
The ‘take-make-waste’ mode of organizing is not sustainable, it’s time for a new work culture that prioritizes human resourcefulness and resilience.
Published 8 October 2021
Report
Will Covid-19 pave the way for more business responsibility? Evidence from Switzerland
Will the Covid-19 pandemic change peoples’ opinions about business responsibility? The future is by no means clear. On the one hand, the pandemic seems to be accelerating the transition towards a s...
Published 1 July 2020