Affiliates
(in alphabetical order:)
Prof. Dr. Tomas Arons
Tomas Arons is a professor at the Department of Law at Utrecht University. As a docent he teaches the courses “International Corporate Law” and “Financiering, Onderneming & Recht”. He also works as a legal advisor for the Vereniging van Effectenbezitters in Den Haag.
Prof. Dr. René Bekkers
René Bekkers is the director of the Center for Philanthropic Studies at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam. After he completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at Utrecht University, he received a personal ‘veni’ grant from the Netherlands Scientific Organization (NWO) to study the effect of education on prosocial behavior. Since 2013 he is a professor by special appointment (‘bijzonder hoogleraar’) at the Faculty of Social Sciences of VU Amsterdam. The chair is supported by the Van der Gaag Foundation of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). He is co-designer of the Center’s biennial ‘Giving in the Netherlands’ Panel Study (GINPS).
He is also the research chair of the European Research Network on Philanthropy (ERNOP). He has written extensively on the topics of philanthropy, pro-social behaviour, and morality. His current research examines the determinants and consequences of giving and volunteering, combining experiments and longitudinal panel survey methodology in a multidisciplinary approach.
Prof. Dr. Jan Biemans
Jan Biemans is a lecturer at the faculty of Law, Economics and Organisation at Utrecht University. Currently, he is involved in teaching subjects within the Bachelor and Master’s program in Dutch law and notarial law. His fields of expertise include general property law, Inheritance law, bankruptcy law, property law and notarial law.
Prof. Dr. Jörn Block
Jörn Block teaches and researches entrepreneurship, innovation, and family business on individual, firm, and country level. His field of research lies between management and economics and he uses qualitative and quantitative research methods. He works at the University of Trier and is affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam. His research interest are Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Family Businesses, middle-class, Foundations, Corporate Governance and Corporate Social Responsibility. In addition, Jörn Block is also president of the FGF, the network of entrepreneurship, innovation, and family business scholars in the German-speaking area.
Dr. Maryse Chappin
Maryse Chappin’s research mainly investigates the process of eco-innovation. To get a better understanding of the topic, she studies the success of inter-organizational collaborations in the context of eco-innovation as well as the collaborations themselves. Moreover her research focuses on the role of the institutional environment on the innovation process. As a member of ECAF, she conducts research on crowdsourcing for innovation; a strategy in which organizations outsource a problem or a task to the crowd.
Dr. Frank-Jan de Graaf
Frank Jan de Graaf works as a lecturer for Corporate Governance & Leadership at CAREM. He is also affiliated with the Amsterdam Business School where he teaches, among other things, Corporate Governance. Until April 2013 he was teaching International Business at Hanzehogeschool Groningen. He previously worked at KPMG and PGGM and was on the board of the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets (NSFM). He has consultancy and research experience in the field of organizational design, in particular governance issues and corporate social responsibility in an international context. He has published in Journal of Business Ethics, Critical perspectives on Accounting, EFMD Global Focus, Journal of Investing and Business & Society.
Dr. Peter Laaper
Dr. Peter Laaper works as a lecturer for financial private law at Utrecht University. He is also a Lawyer at Keijser Van der Velden lawyers, an office specialized in financial law. As a docent he teaches the courses “Onderneming, arbeid en markt” and “Financiering, onderneming en recht”. Additionally, he supervises bachelor's and master's theses. Peter’s research and education focus on financial and private law.
Prof. Dr. Elisabetta Lazzaro
Elisabetta Lazzaro is Professor of Creative Economy at HKU- University of the Arts Utrecht and has been professor of cultural economics at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium, at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, USA and at Padua University, Italy. She holds a PhD in Economics jointly from the Free University of Brussels and Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne University, a Master in Economics & Culture from Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne University, a BA in Economics and Management from Ca’ Foscari Venice University, together with other degrees and fellow studies in economics and the arts in Europe, USA and Australia.
Prof. Lazzaro’s publications, research and teaching focuses on economics, management and policy analysis and design of the arts, culture and creative industries. She is regularly invited as keynote speaker and lecturer in many universities and symposia worldwide. In her field experience Prof. Lazzaro has assisted as a special adviser in scientific and steering committees of major international, European and national institutions, governments and projects.
Prof. Dr. Arnout van de Rijt
Arnout van de Rijt is Professor of Sociology and Designated Chair for the UU strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies. Van de Rijt leads the research line Computational Sociology at the Department of Sociology. His research focuses on the emergence of social structure. His work on cumulative advantage investigates how small, random differences in early success between entities can with time, through positive feedback, grow into large status gaps between the successful and unsuccessful; and how a person or thing can remain highly popular when a less popular alternative is of higher quality.
Van de Rijt received the Lynton Freeman (2010) and Raymond Boudon (2017) early career awards. His papers have been published in such journals as PNAS, American Sociological Review, and the American Journal of Sociology. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in various media, among which the Economist and Nature News.
Prof. Dr. Rotem Shneor
Rotem Shneor is an associate professor at the University of Agder (UiA) School of Business and Law in Norway, and serves as the academic director of the university’s Center of Entrepreneurship. He holds a PhD in International Management from UiA and a Master's of International Business from the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). Since 2014, he has been leading the Nordic Crowdfunding Alliance of platforms, as well as serving as an associate researcher at the Cambridge University Center for Alternative Finance. As a docent he has been teaching a variety of courses in Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Consumer Behavior at bachelor, master and PhD levels. And has supervised master theses and PhD dissertations in these areas. His field of expertise includes international marketing, internet marketing, cognitive aspects of entrepreneurship, and crowdfunding behavior and motivations. In his work he was involved in a number of chapters to research-focused edited books, as well as published in journals such as Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, Cross Cultural Management, Journal of Product & Brand Management, International Journal of Emerging Markets, Journal of e-Business, Global Business and Organizational Excellence, and the Baltic Journal of Management.
Prof Dr. Armin Schwienbacher
Armin Schwienbacher is Professor of Finance at Skema Business School in France, and a guest faculty member at RSM. At RSM he teaches theory and practice of financing of entrepreneurial firms – including crowdfunding. He has presented his research at many universities, international conferences and financial institutions including the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the OECD. He previously worked at the Louvain School of Management, Université Catholique de Louvain, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Duisenberg School of Finance and the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. He recently completed a sabbatical as visiting professor at Schulich School of Business, York University in Canada. In 2003 he received his PhD the University of Namur in Belgium.
Prof. Dr. Lex van Teeffelen
Lex van Teeffelen has been working as a researcher at the Financial and Economic Advisory and Innovation Research Group (FAI) since 2007. Within ‘FAI’, Van Teeffelen is responsible for projects and research. Additionally, he is involved in shaping entrepreneurship education and SME growth programs. His fields of expertise include, new forms of financing in SMEs, SME governance, growth and cooperation strategies within SMEs, success and failure factors in sales and acquisition in SMEs and effect research into different types of advice and support programs. Van Teeffelen is also the academic chair of Transeo, the European Federation of Business Transfers.
In 2010, Lex van Teeffelen obtained his PhD from Nyenrode Business University for a dissertation factors for success and failure in business transfers. The title: Exploring success and failure in small firm business transfers.
Prof. Dr. Silvio Vismara
Silvio Vismara is Professor of Entrepreneurial Finance at the University of Bergamo, Italy. He received his Ph.D. in Economics and management from Politecnico di Torino and University of Bergamo in 2004. He was visiting scholar at the Manchester Business School, at the Cass Business School, and at the University of Florida. He is co-founder of the CCSE research center with the University of Augsburg, Germany. His research on IPOs and crowdfunding has been covered by The Economist, Financial Times, and Investors Chronicle. He has been the guest editor of special issues in Small Business Economics (three times), Corporate Governance An International Review, Journal of Technology Transfer, International Review of Entrepreneurship, Eurasian Business Review, and Journal of Industrial and Business Economics. He established an academic spinoff (Universoft) in 2004 and currently serves as scientific consultant for the Italian Stock Exchange. His research interests are Entrepreneurial finance, Initial Public Offerings, Initial coin offerings, Crowdfunding Affiliations and Awards.
Prof. Dr. Nir Vulkan
Nir Vulkan is author of one of the leading texts on the microeconomics of e-commerce The Economics of E-Commerce: A Strategic Guide to Understanding and Designing the Online Marketplace. The book analyses online trading mechanisms and the way in which web-based technologies such as bidding elves, smart agents and shopping bots, influence the behaviour of consumers and retailers. Nir did a BSc in Mathematics and Computer Science at Tel Aviv University and gained a doctorate in Economics at University College, London, where he was awarded the Dean Scholarship for excellence in PhD studies. He became a Lecturer at Bristol University in 1997, and in 2001 moved to Saïd Business School. He was the Director of the Oxford Centre for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (OxCEI) and the co-founder and Director of OxLab, a laboratory for social science experiments, both at Saїd Business School. Nir’s current research focuses on market design, e-commerce, automated negotiations, personality and strategic behaviour, and entrepreneurship.
Robert Wardrop
Robert Wardrop is a researche fellow in Sociology & Finance in the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge. His fields of expertise include the sociology of financial decision-making; organisational trust; the influence of social institutions and forms of capitalism on the comparative advantage of firms; and alternative forms of finance for SME and middle market firms. Ropert Wardrop has been advising and investing in small and medium-sized businesses in North America, Europe and Asia, for over 30 years. At the moment he serves as a director of Asia Broadcast Satellite, a Hong Kong-based satellite operator, and Clarity Health Services, a US-based health care services provider. Previously, he spent 10 years as European Managing Director for the Anschutz Investment Company, the investment subsidiary of the Anschutz Corporation, which is one of the largest privately owned companies in the United States. He began his career in the Brand Management Group at Procter & Gamble Canada. He is a member of Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Karsten Wenzlaff
Karsten Wenzlaff is the founder of the Institute of Communications for Social Media (ikosom), a Berlin-based research facility for new forms of electronic technology. He has received an MPhil in International Relations with a thesis on international financial regulation from the University of Cambridge. Currently he is a lecturer and Phd Student at the University of Hamburg at the Chair of Digital Markets. He is author of the first European Crowdfunding-Survey and author of the first survey of Crowdfunding in Germany. He also published the first German Crowdsourcing Report.
Bryan Zhang
Bryan Zhang is the Executive Director and a Co-Founder of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. The CCAF conducts alternative finance/FinTech research activities in over 180 countries covering a wide array of areas including crowdfunding, marketplace lending, cryptoasset, blockchain, mobile payment, RegTech, WealthTech and InsureTech etc. The Centre works with more than 3,000 FinTech companies and platforms globally as well as 30+ academic institutions and 300+ FinTech ecosystem stakeholders.
Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF) also collaborate very closely with regulators and policymakers on evidence-based research and regulatory innovation. The Centre has ongoing collaborations with the UK Financial Conduct Authority, the European Commission, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the United Nations etc.