TLS 2023 | Speaker

Prof Dr Tima Bansal

Tima Bansal | Professor of Strategy at the Ivey Business School

Tima Bansal is a Professor of Strategy at the Ivey Business School. She holds honorary doctorates from the University of Hamburg and the Université de Montréal. She is also affiliated with the University of Cambridge and Monash University.

Tima leads Innovation North, which is reimagining business innovation to create better businesses and a more prosperous society. Tima also founded the Network for Business Sustainability and Ivey’s Centre for Building Sustainable Value. Tima is currently the Vice Chair of United Nation’s Principles for Responsible Education and is on the Board of Governors of the Academy of Management.

Tima has received significant accolades for her scholarship. She holds a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Business Sustainability; she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the Academy of Management; she holds the Hellmuth Prize from Western University, the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Organizations and Natural Environment; and, was the first Canadian to be named a Faculty Pioneer for Academic Leadership by the Aspen Institute, a global forum for business and society headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Tima’s research investigates the interplay between business strategy and sustainability. She has published in several top research journals including the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. She has co-edited two books about business and the natural environment and contributes to her own column in Forbes.com. Her research has also been cited in the popular press, including The Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Independent.

She has previously served as a Deputy Editor (2016-2019) and Associate Editor (2010-2013) for the Academy of Management Journal and has served on ten other editorial boards for a range of journals. Since 1999, she has raised over $11M in government grants and $2M in corporate funding for sustainability-related research.

Click here to visit Tima Bansal’s personal webpage.

Topic at the TLS: Keynote

Professor Intercultural Management

Prof Dr Julika Baumann Montecinos

Prof Dr Julika Baumann Montecinos | Professor of Intercultural Management at Furtwangen University and member of the steering team of the Transcultural Caravan, Germany

Julika Baumann Montecinos graduated in Intercultural Business and Cultural Studies from the University of Passau, including various stays in China, India, the Dominican Republic and Brazil, and did her PhD at the University of Hohenheim’s Department of Business Ethics. She pursued a career in the automotive industry before moving into academia, where she headed a research group on Transcultural Competence at Zeppelin University’s Leadership Excellence Institute. As a developer of international teaching, training, research and networking formats, she focuses on a relational view on the success factors of cooperation in contexts of cultural complexity. 

Topic at TLS 2021 – 11^th November
Moderation panel discussion I How to prepare young leaders for cultural complexity?

Divy Bhagia

Divy Bhagia | Environmentally & socially committed filmmaker

Divy Bhagia is an environmentally and socially committed communicator
from India. Over 11 years, he has worked on diverse projects, from SBCC and
RCCE to commercials, documentaries, and even a Virtual Reality film. He
also led social development programs in Gujarat and proudly represents
India as a UNICEF South Asia – Climate Change Champion.
His academic journey spans Engineering, Psychology, and Development
Communication and he is passionate about using cinematic mediums to
promote a sustainable coexistence between humans, wildlife, and nature.

Fernanda Carreira

Fernanda Carreira | Head of the Education for Sustainability Program at FGVces (Brazil)

Fernanda Carreira is the head of the Education for Sustainability Program at the FGVces in Brazil. Her areas of expertise are education for sustainability and organization strategies. Ms. Carreira has led projects of education for sustainability in Master and undergraduate courses, as well as applied research and projects in companies. At FGVces she has also coordinated a business platform called Companies for the Climate and was for 3 years the Executive Secretary of the Center, responsible for strategic planning, fundraising and institutional representativeness. Prior to FGVces, she had a six-year experience in advisory firms such as PwC and Edelman Significa, always in sustainability projects, and she has also worked at NGOs. PhD candidate in Organizational Studies at FGV EAESP, exploring how the theory of imaginaries can be brought to business education in the Anthropocene Era. She holds a MsC in Management with an emphasis on Sustainability at FGV EAESP, where she also has a postgraduate degree in Sustainability Management and has a degree in Business Administration.

Topic at the TLS: Panel Discussion | Leading towards sustainable futures

Tobias Grünfelder

Tobias Grünfelder | Moderator, Ph.D. candidate and project manger

Tobias Grünfelder is a research fellow and Ph.D. student at the chair of Institutional Economics at Zeppelin University’s Leadership Excellence Institute (LEIZ) and a project manager at the Transcultural Caravan. His research focus on transcultural management studies aims at understanding the conditions and determinants of productive transcultural cooperation, focusing on the related organisational and individual learning processes.
In addition to his research, he works as a facilitator, keynote speaker, magician and intercultural trainer. In cooperation with the German embassy and the Goethe-Institute he has traveled to various countries as a “magical ambassador” to promote cultural exchange.

Topic at the TLS: Moderation

Dr Michael Karrer

Michael Karrer | Senior Vice President Sustainability & EHS at ZF

Michael Karrer studied International Business Administration in Innsbruck (Austria) and Louvain (Belgium) and worked for 5 years as a research assistant. He received his doctor’s degree with a thesis on Supply Chain Performance Management.

He joined ZF in 2006 and worked for 5 years in the field of strategic logistics, leading projects on inventory optimization, delivery performance and lean logistics in several of ZF’s global sites. For three years, he served as project lead for the industrialization of a truck transmission in Hangzhou China. From 2014 to 2016, Michael was responsible for supplier management at ZF group, focusing on supplier quality performance, risk management and supply chain sustainability. Since January 2021, he is the global lead for sustainability and EHS. He is convinced that sustainability is not only about complying with regulations but must be an integral part of the business strategy. By embedding sustainability in processes and decision-making, it is possible to interlink long-term business success with a company’s responsibility for society and the environment.

Director, Vice President

Dr Ngoc Lan Thi Dang

Dr Ngoc Lan Thi Dang I Director of the Language Center and Foundation Year of Vietnamese-German University (VGU), Vice President of the Scientific Board of Nam Viet Institute of Education Sciences and Country Director of Women’s Empowerment and Voice (WEAV)

Ngoc Lan Thi Dang, Ph.D., is Director of the Language Center and Foundation Year of Vietnamese-German University (VGU) in Vietnam. Dr. Dang earned her Master’s degree in Educational Management and Human Resource Development at the University of Sydney in Australia in 2002, and her doctoral degree in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education at Michigan State University (MSU) in the U.S. in 2012. Her research interests are in gender equality, women and leadership in academia, transcultural women’s leadership, global citizenship, female students in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math), transnational higher education, and EMI (English-medium instruction). She has had a number of publications with Emerald Publishing Limited in the United Kingdom, SAGE, Taylor & Francis Group, and some high quality journals in the U.S. Currently, Dr. Dang is also the Vice President of the Scientific Board of Nam Viet Institute of Education Sciences based in Ho Chi Minh City and Country Director of Women’s Empowerment and Voice (WEAV), an American non-governmental organization to promote gender equality in education for girls and women in economically challenged communities in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam.

Topic at TLS 2021 – 12th November
Workshop | Women in Leadership – Perspectives from Southeast Asia

Prof Maria Fernanda Lemos

Maria Fernanda Lemos | Professor of Urban Planning and Design at PUC-Rio

Maria Fernanda Lemos is a Professor of Urbanism at PUC-Rio. She is the leader of the Urbanism Laboratory (U.Lab/PUC-Rio) and lead author of the Urban Areas in Coastal Zones (ARC3-2) and Equity and Justice (ARC3-3) chapters, UCCRN (Urban Climate Research Network).

In addition, she is the lead Author Coordinator of the Central and South America chapter, AR6/WGII/IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

Prof Florentina Paraschiv

Florentina Paraschiv | Professor of Financial Economics

Florentina Paraschiv Professor, Zeppelin University and Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Senior Lecturer

Dr Yolande Steenkamp

Dr Yolande Steenkamp | Senior Lecturer University of Pretoria

Dr Yolande Steenkamp is a senior lecturer at the Albert Luthuli Leadership Institute (ALLI) at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and manager of the South African national network of the SDSN (Sustainable Development Solutions Network). Her approach to research is largely interdisciplinary and aimed at addressing contemporary challenges. In interdisciplinary projects on leadership, she contributes on questions of ethics, meaning, and value, as well as collaboration for sustainable development. She has visited Zeppelin Universität, Friedrichshafen on several occasions and is a friend of the Transcultural Caravan.

Topic at TLS 2021 – 12^th November 
Moderation Workshop I Social Entrepreneurship in Southeast Asia

Prof Dr Josef Wieland

Prof Dr Josef Wieland I Director of the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin and Founder of the Transcultural Caravan

Prof. Josef Wieland holds the Chair of Institutional Economics, Organisational Governance, Integrity Management and Transcultural Leadership and is the Director of the Leadership Excellence Institute Zeppelin | LEIZ. An expert in the field of compliance and business ethics for more than 30 years, he initiated the Forum Compliance & Integrity (FCI) and chairs the Advisory Board of the German Network of Business Ethics (DNWE). He is a member of, inter alia, the national CSR Forum, the jury for the German government’s CSR Award, and the Advisory Council for Sustainability of the government of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg. Josef Wieland developed the theory of Relational Economics, and he is the founder and academic director of the “Transcultural Caravan”.

Topic at the TLS: Keynote