Esade Center for Social Impact

The Esade Center for Social Impact (ECSI) is an academic think tank that works toward a world where people and organizations better understand and solve complex global challenges. We do so by developing research with rigor, reach, and relevance for and about social impact.

As part of our mission, we engage with current and future leaders to influence practice and policy. We create the conditions to understand problems; ask difficult questions to spur novel thinking and innovative ideas; pilot progressive change; and generate knowledge, tools, and solutions to help train the leaders that enable social change.

The center was created as part of the Esade Entrepreneurship Institute (EEI) in 2017 and became a separate entity within Esade during the 2021-2022 academic year.

The Esade Chair in Social Impact, backed by the BBK Banking Foundation, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and Impact Bridge, is a pioneering initiative created to advance social impact across research, business, investment, and talent development. It bridges academic rigor and real-world action to generate knowledge that matters. Through academic and applied research, collaboration between academia and industry, and leadership development, it equips practitioners, students, and scholars to embed impact-driven strategies into business, investment, and policy. With this vision, the Chair aspires to become an international benchmark and a catalyst for impactful approaches to today’s most pressing social and environmental challenges.

Impact Measurement & Management

The Esade Center for Social Impact together with BBK have organized a European and Spanish Community of Practice on Impact Measurement and Management for Foundations since the fall of 2020. This group of foundation professionals have come together to increase transparency, knowledge-sharing, and exchange within the European foundation sector on this topic.

Impact Entrepreneurship

EXPAND is a three-year Erasmus project to develop a methodology for accelerating the development of solutions for social challenges. As academic partners in the project, the Esade Center for Social Impact together with the Esade Institute for Social Innovation and ESSEC, have developed a methodology and piloted it at Esade as an elective course on homelessness.