Societal Impact Conference

Today’s societal issues such as climate change and inequality are posing great challenges for business leaders. Business schools play a crucial role in preparing future leaders to address these challenges effectively by ensuring they have the right skills and competencies to navigate complex problems and contribute to a sustainable and equitable world.  Panelists will explore how business schools can develop leaders who bring innovative solutions to the world’s challenges and create business models that operate within the Earth’s system boundaries while achieving financial goals.  

Moderator:

Hanne Harmsen, Copenhagen Business School

Hanne Harmsen is Vice Dean for Green Transition at CBS, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Hanne has spent her career centered around creating societal impact from Higher Education. First as an academic within the field of innovation management. Following that, through university leadership positions within research and education as Dean of Research, Aarhus School of Business and Vice Provost for Education, University of Copenhagen. She has also worked with the Higher Education Sector from Deloitte Consulting and from the funding side, as EVP in Innovation Fund Denmark. 

Panelists: 

Katherine Richardson, University of Copenhagen

Katherine Richardson is a professor in biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen, leader of the Sustainability Science Centre, a principle investigator in the Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, and Leader of the Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society. Her research focuses on the importance of biological processes in the ocean for the uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere and how ocean biology, including diversity, contributes to ocean function in the Earth System. Katherine is also a core developer of the Planetary Boundaries framework that attempts to identify a safe operating space for humanity in its impact on global resources.

Paulo Savaget, University of Oxford

Paulo Savaget, author of The Four Workarounds, is an associate professor at Oxford University’s Engineering Sciences Department and the Saïd Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar and has a background working as a lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and researcher finding innovative solutions for a more inclusive world. As a consultant, he worked on projects for large companies, non-profits, government agencies in Latin America, and the OECD.