Lisa Hehenberger, PhD

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 entrepreneurship. Dr. Hehenberger is a member of the Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium set up by the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and a member of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 Advisory Council, a group of leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship. She is also 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).

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, such as the Academy of Management Journal, as well as in practitioner-oriented publications, such as Stanford Social Innovation Review. She is a member of the scientific board of SDA Bocconi School of Management’s Impact Investing Lab and 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, through which she is engaged in numerous research projects (e.g. on migrant social entrepreneurship, social impact bonds, venture philanthropy, impact investing in Spain, etc.) 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 sits on the advisory boards of impact investing funds such as Creas, Rubio Impact Ventures, Oryx Impact Fund, People and Planet Partners, and Seastainable Ventures and of Lyfebulb. 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, where she currently serves as a strategic advisor on research and policy. She also represents the ESADE Entrepreneurship Institute as the academic partner of the Spanish National Advisory Board on Impact Investing (Spain NAB) and served on the French National Advisory Board and the Impact Measurement Working Group of the Social Impact Investment Task Force established by the G8.

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.