Dr. Valeria Cavotta is Assistant Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano where she teaches social entrepreneurship and B2B marketing. Her research interests are social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and business ethics. In the past, Dr. Valeria Cavotta taught social entrepreneurship at University of Klagenfurt and business ethics at Queen Mary University in London. Before joining the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, she won a scholarship funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to do a post-doc at Imperial College Business School. Dr. Valeria Cavotta earned a PhD in management from the University of Lausanne.

Nik Baerten is a knowledge engineer. For several years he was active as a multidisciplinary researcher at the Digital Culture Department of the Maastricht McLuhan Institute, where he blended insights across disciplines such as design, architecture, new media, history, biology, philosophy, intelligent systems, organic systems, etc. In 2004 he co-founded Pantopicon, a studio for foresight and design, based in Antwerp (Belgium). The studio crafts provocative futures in order to stimulate debate regarding tomorrow’s challenges and opportunities. Hence they help both public and private organizations to explore the long term, to build visions and strategies, to design concepts for new products, services and experiences, often in a participatory way. In the studio’s way of work a lot of attention goes to rendering the future tangible through various means, as a way to allow a wide range of audiences and co-creators of solutions for the future to engage with it in a inspiring and productive way. Besides a frequent speaker on all things future, foresight & design, and design for social innovation, Nik is also a guest lecturer at the MAD Faculty (C-Mine, Genk, B) and part of the DESIS network. As creators of the “Museum In Our Street” toolkit for the enhancement of social cohesion, Pantopicon and partner Studio Dott were awarded with a Henry Van de Velde label by Design Flanders and recently a Service Design Award by Core77.

Guido Palazzo is Professor of Business Ethics at HEC, University of Lausanne. He studied business administration and philosophy at the University of Bamberg (Germany) and wrote his PhD in political philosophy at the University of Marburg (Germany). His research deals with corporate responsibility in global supply chains, the mechanisms of (un)ethical decision making in organizations, the fight against organized crime and the impact of storytelling on behavior. He is one of the most cited business ethics scholar in the world. His articles have been published in journals such as Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Business Ethics Quarterly and Journal of Business Ethics. He is associate editor of the Business Ethics Quarterly and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Management Studies, the Academy of Management Review and Business & Society. One of his recent papers on Cosa Nostra in Sicily was one of three finalists of the prestigious Academy of Management Journal best paper award 2016. Guido Palazzo has received the Max Weber Award for his research on multinational corporations by the German president. He consults and teaches on business ethics and CSR at numerous multinational corporations such as Siemens, Daimler, Airbus, Volvo, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Stora Enso and Johnson & Johnson. He currently directs a training program on sustainable leadership for senior officials of the Chinese Communist Party.