Vikram Gandhi is a Senior Lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. He has developed and teaches a new course, Investing – Risk, Return, and Impact, in the Elective Curriculum of the MBA Program. He also teaches The Entrepreneurial Manager, and FIELD Global Immersion in the Required Curriculum of the MBA Program, as well as various Executive Education Programs. In addition, Vikram is a visiting faculty member of Schwarzman College and Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is a member of the Impact Co-Laboratory focusing on research in the area of Impact Investing.

Vikram is the Founder of Asha Impact, an impact investing platform and is a Senior Advisor to The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. He is a member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) since 1997 and has been a  part of the New York, Hong Kong and Mumbai chapters.  He has spent 23 years in investment banking at Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School (Class of 1989) where he was designated a Baker Scholar, and a B.Com with high distinction from the University of Mumbai. He is also a qualified Chartered Accountant.

Valerie Threlfall is the founder and principal of Ekouté, a consulting firm based in Oakland, CA that specializes in helping organizations to gather input and feedback from stakeholders, especially those that they seek to serve. Ekouté has led multiple strategy and listening projects for clients including Crescent Porter Hale Foundation, Feedback Labs, Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco, New Door Ventures, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

A core project for Ekouté is staffing Listen4Good, a capacity building initiative of the Fund for Shared Insight that focuses on strengthening organizations’ efforts to listen and incorporate feedback from those they serve into their work. As Listen4Good’s founding director, Valerie led the initial design of the offering and now oversees a coaching and central product and program team that supports more than 500 organizations.

Valerie brings significant expertise in data-driven decision-making, strategy, and impact measurement to her work. Prior to starting Ekouté, she was founding director of the Center for Effective Philanthropy’s (CEP’s) YouthTruth project—one of the first national efforts to gather comparative feedback from students about what’s working and not working in their schools. Prior to joining CEP, Valerie was part of the core business team that built a successful start-up biotechnology company, Momenta Pharmaceuticals. Valerie holds a joint MBA and MPP from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr Lucy Kimbell is Director, Social Design Institute, and Professor of Contemporary Design Practices at University of the Arts London. Her research looks at the emergence and development of ‘design thinking’ and the use of design expertise to address organisational, social and public policy issues. Lucy is currently co-investigator on two UKRI funded projects which are cross-disciplinary and co-produced with non-academic partners using design to address the contemporary issues of AI and Anti-Microbial Resistance. Lucy was AHRC design research fellow in Policy Lab, a team in the Cabinet Office in 2014-15 and worked with the EU Policy Lab team using design and futures approaches. She was previously Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford for five years and taught design thinking on the MBA for 14 years as well as being involved in executive education.

Twitter @lixindex

Martina Castro is a Development Impact Manager at CDC Group, the UK’s development finance institution. She is responsible for assessing and managing the development impact of investments and improving impact management practices in line with the latest practices and standards. Prior to joining CDC, Martina advised governments, development finance institutions and donors on private sector development and financial inclusion initiatives. Martina started her career in impact investing in Switzerland. She was advised private clients and family offices, before moving to Haiti where she worked as CFO for a social enterprise. Martina holds a Master in International Affairs from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.