Filipe Santos is the Alfredo da Silva Professor of Social Innovation and Dean of CATÓLICA-LISBON since February 2019. He also holds the Chair Girl Move Academy for Innovation. He is Visiting Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, a School where he was a Professor of Entrepreneurship for 12 years between 2003 and 2014. At INSEAD, Professor Santos led ICE - INSEAD Centre for Entrepreneurship from 2009 to 2013 and was founder and Academic Director of the INSEAD Social Entrepreneurship Initiative from 2007 to 2014. Professor Santos has a degree in Economics and a Masters in Management & Strategy. He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, with a focus on Entrepreneurship. He served as Chair of the Graduate Student Council of Stanford University, comprising 8000 graduate students, and was the recipient of the Lieberman Fellowship, an award recognizing outstanding scholarship and institutional contributions.
Professor Santos’ research has been published in top journals, received several international awards and has been cited more than 11000 times (Google Scholar). His work lies at the intersection of strategy, organization theory and entrepreneurship with a focus on the emerging field of social entrepreneurship and social innovation, hybrid organizations, impact investing and scaling impact. Professor Santos is co-author of the 2013 book “The Social Entrepreneur´s Guide to Changing the World”. As an educator, Professor Santos won the INSEAD GEMBA 2008 award for Outstanding Teacher in non-core Courses. He was finalist for this same award for the GEMBA 2009 and 2010 Classes and received the Dean’s commendation for Excellence in MBA teaching in 2010. He also received the EFMD 2012 award for best case in the Africa category with the Nuru Energy case series.
At CATÓLICA-LISBON, Filipe teaches social entrepreneurship, social innovation and impact investing courses. He is a regular key note speaker and also mentors entrepreneurs and advises venture investors. As an entrepreneur in the social and public arenas, Professor Santos co-founded IES - Social Business School in 2009 and the Laboratory for Social Investment in 2013 (now called Maze-Decoding Impact). In 2015, he founded and was the first President of Portugal Social Innovation, a government agency that aims to catalyse the social investment market in Portugal. The social innovation policy he helped design and implement is now considered a best practice in Europe. Professor Santos was Board member and Chair of the European Venture Philanthropy Association (EVPA), member of the investment committee of the Social Innovation Fund (FIS), and a jury member of several international social innovation awards. He believes in contributing to an economic system aligned with the generation of impact and wellbeing, a system that leverages the entrepreneurial drive and search for purpose of all citizens. In September 2019 he won the global Social Innovation Thought Leader Award by the Schwab Foundation, a sister organization of the World Economic Forum, and was considered one of the world’s high impact researchers by Clarivate Analytics.