Katherine Milligan

Director

Katherine is a dual American-Swiss citizen based in the international city of Geneva. Katherine is a teacher, writer, speaker and mentor in the field of social entrepreneurship. For ten years, the last six as Executive Director, she led the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the sister organization of the World Economic Forum, which supports the largest community of late-stage social entrepreneurs in the world. While at the Schwab Foundation, she led several influential research initiatives on social innovation policy frameworks, models of corporate social innovation, and on systems change approaches and strategies. In 2015, she launched the first-ever Harvard Executive Education module on systems change, co-chaired by esteemed faculty Julie Battilana and Alnoor Ebrahim and offered annually to awardees of the Schwab Foundation.

Named a "Top 100 Women in Social Entrepreneurship” by the Euclid Network, today Katherine is affiliated with many innovation and entrepreneurial networks, including as a founding member of the Geneva Innovation Movement, an elea Fellow at IMD Business School, an Accelerate2030 Advisory Council Member, an Unreasonable Mentor, an advisor to The Wellbeing Project, a board member of Water for People and a former board member of Social Impact Award. Her research and articles have been published widely by the International Institute of Economics, Stanford Social Innovation Review, MIT journal Innovations, Forum Agenda, and the Harvard Business School.

Katherine’s formative experiences living, working, and traveling in East and West Africa and Central America, as well as an early mentoring relationship with the renowned systems thinker and writer Donella Meadows, shaped her worldview and helped her cultivate a systems mindset and a lifelong commitment to social and environmental change.

Katherine received her BA from Dartmouth College and her MPP from Harvard University where she was a Pforzheimer Scholar and a Sheldon Knox Fellow. She is an adjunct professor of social innovation at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies and Fordham University.