1. Research
  2. Research areas
  3. Innovation

About

Dew drops

Our group seeks to identify revolutionary business opportunities, and to illuminate the ways in which they may benefit existing infrastructures.

We have close ties with colleagues in operations management, digital marketing, finance, accounting, responsible business, and large-scale infrastructure programme management.  We work closely with faculty and researchers in the Oxford Internet Institute, the Blavatnik School of Government, the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, the Technology & Management Centre for Development, and with affiliated researchers in the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship.

Members of the group serve as editors, associate editors, and editorial board members of key journals in strategy, management theory, social innovation and social entrepreneurship. We also serve as special issue editors for recent journal themes on sustainable business models, services innovation, social innovation, and business model innovation.

Research

Our research approaches core questions of innovation in the context of industries and sectors being re-imagined and transformed. 

We have a robust interest in social innovation and social entrepreneurship and conduct pioneering work on hybrid forms, processes, and logics.  We engage with new questions in finance which explore new tools, products and conceptions of finance for social impact, and actively engage with social policy issues around impact and innovation. We support studies that overlap with colleagues in global strategy and international business on emerging value and commodity chains, on concepts like the ‘Circular Economy’, building institutional capacity in developing economies, and in responding to global ‘grand challenges’ in climate change adaptation, sustainability, Fourth Industrial Revolution governance and policy, and innovation policy.

Our research contributes to the lively, current conversation ‘Oxford on Strategy’, a distributed research and teaching initiative that has staked out an agenda for shared work among the faculty in the School. This strategy aims to open up questions about firms, as well as public agencies and civil society organisations, and seeks to define and animate studies of wider ecosystems. It attends to standard profit metrics, in addition to alternative metrics of performance which illuminate social good and commonwealth, impact, and sustainable performance.

Find out more about our group's latest research.

Programmes

Exec ed conference

Our group teach a variety of MBA and EMBA courses, contribute to core Diploma modules, convene doctoral seminars and teach undergraduates. We also teach executive education programmes for senior executives and public services professionals, primarily with a focus on leading innovation and transformation, and on the rise of impact investment. For more information, visit the programme finder. 

We maintain regular contact with our alumni, who are working in critical agencies and firms around the world, both in the incumbent industries of the 20th century and the emerging fields of commerce and society in the 21st century.  Many have founded industry-defining firms and social agencies that are shaping sustainable commerce and finance, direct action interventions in the idiom of social innovation, and start-ups that explore and experiment with new technologies and new social commitments.

People

Marc Ventresca

Marc Ventresca

Associate Professor of Strategic Management
Alex Nicholls

Alex Nicholls

Professor of Social Entrepreneurship