Alex Nicholls

Professor Alex Nicholls MBA is the first tenured professor in social entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford and was the first staff member of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship in 2004. His research ranges across several key areas within social entrepreneurship and social innovation, including social and impact investment; the nexus of relationships between accounting, accountability, and governance; public and social policy contexts; and Fair Trade. To date Nicholls has published over a hundred papers, working papers, book chapters and articles and six books. Most appear in a wide range of peer reviewed journals and books, including seven 4* papers in Financial Times Top 30 journals. His work has been cited more than 12,000 times. His 2009 paper on social investment won the Best Paper Award (Entrepreneurship) at the British Academy of Management. In 2010, Nicholls edited a Special Edition of Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice on social entrepreneurship – the first time a top tier management journal had recognized the topic in this way. He is the General Editor of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.  Nicholls is also the co-author of a major research book on Fair Trade (with Charlotte Opal, Sage, 2005) and the editor of a collection of key papers on social entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2006, 2008). Both represent the best-selling and most cited academic books on their subjects in the world. In 2011, Nicholls published a co-edited volume on social innovation – the first scholarly book on the subject. In 2015, he published a co-edited volume on social finance (again, the first academic collection on the subject) and a new book on social innovation with NESTA. Nicholls was the Principal Investigator on a four year, 3 million Euro, EU funded research project CRESSI. This resulted in an edited collection published in 2020, Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation (Oxford University Press, 2019).