ProfessorMaurizio Zollo

Maurizio Zollo is Professor of Strategy & Sustainability at Imperial College Business School and Scientific Director of the Leonardo Centre on Business for Society.

The Leonardo Centre studies and contributes to the evolution of business toward a regenerative and inclusive economic system. To do so, it leverages a unique dataset of almost 2 million corporate sustainability initiatives by 20,000 companies over 25 years (all sectors, 105 countries). The Centre also involves corporations and institutions in field experiments to test the effectiveness of organizational and business model innovations as well as collective actions in the simultaneous creation of profit and systemic impact.  In addition to a global, multi-disciplinary network of scholars and research centres in top universities, Leonardo's agenda includes the collaboration of international institutions, including the World Bank, IFC and UN agencies in developing policy implications to support and stimulate the evolution of the private sector role toward the realization of the UN SDGs.

Maurizio is the author of over 60 publications (25,000+ citations) in leading academic journals in management, strategy, organization, innovation, neuroscience, and cross-disciplinary science, including Nature Communications. A past President of the European Academy of Management, he was also past Editor-in-Chief of Organization & Environment (IF grew from 2,6 to 8,5) and of the European Management Review. Elected a fellow of the Strategic Management Society (SMS), he co-founded the Stakeholder Strategy group and chaired the Innovation and Knowledge and the Behavioural Strategy interest groups at SMS.

Before joining Imperial College in 2019, Maurizio served on the faculty of INSEAD and Bocconi University and has been a Visiting Professor at the Sloan School of Management of MIT since 2012. He holds a PhD in management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a degree in monetary economics from Bocconi University. Prior to his academic career, he was a strategy consultant at McKinsey & Co. and an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in New York.