Prof. Dr. Bert de Groot, Rector Magnificus and Dean: “The need for innovations in technology, products and services, organizational forms both inside and outside of one’s own business sector on an international level illustrates the complexity of the greatest challenge to today’s generation of top executives and managers. Taco van Someren has played a prominent innovative role, both in an academic sense as well as in practice. He is a regular source of surprising, conceptual insights, which always possess a highly-practical application value.”
“Developing and implementing fundamentally new business models is one of the most important keys to solving the sustainability problem. It is furthermore an area which has the potential to generate entirely new breeds of companies, and even new business sectors. Economic progress and the creation of a sustainable society are thereby long-term goals which go hand-in-hand,” according to Van Someren.
About Taco van Someren
Taco van Someren studied Business Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and then went on to work as a manager in the consumer goods industry. He subsequently received his doctoral degree from the Tinbergen Institute/University of Amsterdam, graduating summa cum laude. As a partner in KPMG, he started up new divisions both in the Netherlands and abroad, specializing in the field of sustainability and innovation. He later started his own consultancy firm, Ynnovate.
Van Someren is the academic founder of the professional field of non-technological innovations, and has international experience in the renewal of business models. He has been appointed Seconded Innovation Expert at the European Commission, and since 2006, has been special professor and special advisor of ‘Strategic Innovation and Sustainability’ at the Beijing Normal University.
About the Nyenrode Center for Sustainability
The Center for Sustainability (CfS) at Nyenrode Business Universiteit is an academic group of professionals, focused on supporting business and government in approaching opportunities and challenges they face in sustainable business. The CfS does this through research and consulting activities involving innovative organisational management and strategic development, the development of new partnership forms for businesses, and the integration of scientific and practical knowledge in education at Nyenrode.
Nyenrode Business Universiteit has elevated sustainable business practices, the challenge of sustainability, to place it among the ranks of the central themes in its research and education endeavours.