8th Effectuation Conference - 

Building the Global Effectual Classroom

Keynote Speaker Biographies

Christina Theodoraki is an Associate Professor in entrepreneurship and strategic management at Toulouse Business School (France), affiliate professor at the International University of Monaco, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Development Strategies at the University of Indiana, and Business Development Manager at the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Research Network. She also leads the Babson Collaborative Research Group on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems. She is Editor of Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, Associate Editor of Journal of Small Business Management and member of the associate editorial boards of Review of Managerial Science, Entrepreneurship Research Journal, Journal of Enterprising Communities, Journal of the Knowledge Economy. 

Her research interests include entrepreneurial ecosystems, entrepreneurial support, and interorganizational strategies with a focus on business incubators. Her research has been published in journals such as Small Business Economics, Journal of Business Research, European Management Review, R&D Management, Management, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, The Journal of Technology Transfer, International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Revue de l’Entrepreneuriat, Revue Internationale PME, etc. Her research, contribution and commitment to the scientific society received international recognition. Her thesis received two Best Dissertations Awards from the AEI academy and the AIREPME research association. She received the Babson Collaborative Member of the Year 2021 Award; 2 Best webinar and Best Article Resiliency Awards and a Best Policy Paper Award from the ICSB - International Council for Small Business. 

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-theodoraki-083bb548/

Dries Faems was born in Belgium, has lived for 10 years in the Netherlands, holds the Chair of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technological Transformation at the WHU Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany, and enjoys a visiting professor position at Luiss Guido Carli University in Italy. 

As academic co-director of the WHU Entrepreneurship Center, he contributes to further developing and nurturing the WHU entrepreneurial network, which has been recognized as one of the most successful European networks in terms of realizing startup exits and producing unicorns. He also coordinated the WHU Innovation Ecosystem Hub, where he and other colleagues try to bring together academic scholars and practitioners on the topic of collaboration for innovation.

His research activities focus on exploring how companies can build partnerships and ecosystems for successful innovation. Recently, he started experimenting with state-of-the-art NLP algorithms in Python to explore how these novel methodologies can help us to better map and analyze entrepreneurial ecosystems. His research has been published in prominent journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, Strategic Management Journal and Research Policy. He was the general editor of Journal of Management Studies. His research has been disseminated in opinion pieces for several magazines and newspapers and by regularly co-hosting the WHU Most Awesome Founder Podcast (https://mostawesomepodcast.com/).

LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dries-faems-0371569/

Shabnam Mousavi is a Senior Researcher and Team Leader at CENTAI. She holds a PhD in Statistics and a PhD in Economics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Research visits to the Yale School of Management as part of the A Three-Tier Framework for Modeling Action project (in collaboration with Shyam Sunder) led to the co-founding of a new scientific community of social scientists and computer scientists dealing with the exact opposite of rational behavior: zero-intelligent agents in various market structures.

Shabnam Mousavi is a member of the steering committee of the Bank of Italy’s Behavioral Financial Regulation and Policy (BEFAIRLY) initiative, in the context of which conversations began that introduced topological data analysis, the latest strand of her research (Mousavi & Rasetti 2022). The fundamental focuses of her work include analyzing the foundations and concepts of the behavioral and computer sciences, then using physical laws as a structuring framework to build an integrative framework for future explorations.

Jan Wyrwiński’s goal is to build and support global tech companies out of Central and Eastern Europe. Having been a founder of a successful tech company in the past, he transitioned into becoming an investor and co-founder of a venture capital firm called Alfabeat. Recently, he has co-founded an impressive tech company in the data sharing space known as Trusted Twin.

He is driven by a commitment to integrity, hard work, and a global mindset, which he brings to technology companies both as an investor and as a founder. With a background in engineering from Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland and Hochschule Stralsund in Germany, he has consistently worked with people, adeptly bridging the gap between different worlds. This includes navigating the realms of business and engineering, connecting founders and investors, as well as fostering collaboration between Central and Eastern Europe and the United States.