HSG Impact Scholar Community

Building a community for impact-oriented scholars

Summary

The HSG Impact Scholar Community connects scholars aiming to conduct research that positively contributes to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and fosters positive social and environmental change. The community organizes workshops and event and collaborates with different stakeholders around impact scholarship.

Theory of Change

Challenge
Impact scholarship takes place in different organizational entities across HSG, often also across disciplines (e.g., law, economics, entrepreneurship). There is a need to create connection and a forum for exchange for impact scholars from these different organizational units and research fields.
Activities
Topic-focused events and workshops
Connection and community-focused events and workshops
Regular newsletter
Collaborations with different stakeholders at HSG and beyond
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Outputs & Outcomes
A sense of community for impact scholars
A solid basis for research collaborations
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Impacts
Skills and capacities for more impactful scholarship and contributions to positive societal impact

Status & Current Focus

This project kicked off on 2021-07-06 and we are currently in a Running phase.

We are constantly trying to extent the circle of impact scholarship. For 2026, we are trying to further create shared ownership of the community and distributed responsibilities for organizing events, workshops and collaborations.

Emerging Outputs, Outcomes & Impacts

Output
Event (2025-08-27): Presentation of the Ownership Project by Professor Nien-hê Hsieh of HBS with following discussion.
Output
Workshop (2025-09-24): Who Gets Credit? Addressing Authorship Challenges in Academic Research with Dr. Mary Hausfeld of UZH.
Output
Community event (2025-09-24): Community Semster Kick-off: Celebrating achievements, setting intentions
Output
Dialogue (2025-10-14): From Research to Impact: Dialogue on Engaged Scholarship with Prof. Andy Hoffman of UMICH

Partners & Collaborators

University of St.Gallen (HSG)
This project is facilitated by different PhD students and postdocs at HSG.

Get Involved

Does the HSG Impact Scholar Community sound interesting to you? Do you have existing activities or ambitions that could be linked to this project? We are looking for partners and collaborators. Please get in touch!

Additional Information

Both the concept and the name of our local community was inspired by the Impact Scholar Community which was established in 2020 and is supported by the Academy of Management (AOM) and hosted by the Organization and the Natural Environment AOM division. The HSG Impact Scholar Community as a local spinn-off was jointly initiated by early career researchers at the Competence Center for Social Innovation (CSI-HSG), the Institute of Management and Strategy (IfB) and the Institute for Economy and the Environment (IWÖ).