Alex Nicholls

Biography

Dr Alex Nicholls is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship within the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. His research interests range across several key areas within social entrepreneurship and social innovation, including: social finance and social impact investing; the nexus of relationships between accounting, accountability and governance; public and social policy contexts; and Fair Trade. As the first staff member of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in 2004, Alex has helped the Centre develop a global profile in researching and teaching social entrepreneurship. He is also the General Editor of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, the leading academic journal in the field. Alex is the editor of Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change (Oxford University Press, 2006), the first book to present a wide-ranging, internationally focussed collection of key social entrepreneurship work from leading academics, policy makers and practitioners. It remains the most cited scholarly book on the subject. In 2011, he co-edited Social Innovation: Blurring Boundaries to Reconfigure Markets (Palgrave MacMillan), a collection that explores solutions to many of the current ‘wicked problems’ confronting the world. The book argues that social innovation offers potential solutions to climate change, the crisis of the welfare state, health pandemics and failures, social dislocation and inequality, and educational failure. Alex’s second book on social innovation was published in 2015 in collaboration with NESTA, New Frontiers of Social Innovation (Palgrave MacMillan).

Research Interest

Social entrepreneurship, Social innovation, The nexus of relationships between social accounting, accountability and governance, Public and social policy contexts of social innovation, Social impact investing. Fair Trade