2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Julia Binder, IMD Business School

Julia Binder
IMD Business School

“Julia Binder works with organizations around the world to lead transformation and build future-ready businesses that innovate, adapt, and lead with purpose. A recognized thought leader, she helps senior executives translate signals of change into strategy, innovation, and leadership action. Her teaching and research focus on how leaders can navigate disruption, reimagine their organizations, and create value in a rapidly changing world. 

“As Director of IMD’s Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business, Julia Binder brings together IMD’s diverse expertise to help companies turn global challenges into strategic opportunities. The Center acts as a bridge between insight and action, supporting leaders in designing transformation pathways that drive economic success while contributing positively to society and the planet. It partners with sustainability leaders to research and share innovative best practices that harness opportunities and mitigate risk.” – Stefan Michel, Professor of Management, Dean of Faculty and Research at IMD

Julia Binder, 38, is Professor of Business Transformation at IMD Business School, where she serves as Director of the Center for Sustainable and Inclusive Business. Her research and teaching focus on how organizations can navigate disruption, reimagine their business models, and build competitive advantage in a rapidly changing world, with particular emphasis on the strategic dimensions of circularity, innovation, and sustainability. 

Binder is a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader (2025) and was featured on the Thinkers50 Radar list (2022) for her work at the intersection of sustainability, innovation, and leadership. Her book, The Circular Business Revolution (Pearson, 2024), co-authored with Manuel Braun, reframes circularity as one of the most consequential strategic levers available to senior leaders in the coming decade, translating the concept into actionable pathways for growth and transformation. 

At IMD, she is Program Director of Creating Value in the Circular Economy and teaches across the MBA, EMBA, Transition to Business Leadership, and Leading Sustainable Business Transformation programs, as well as a wide portfolio of custom executive programs. She is a committed educator, and her cases have been recognized with the Outstanding Case Writer Hot Topic distinction at The Case Centre Awards and Competitions (2024) and the EFMD Responsible Leadership Award (2022). 

Her research has been published in leading academic and practitioner journals including Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Academy of Management Review. 

Before joining IMD, Binder served as Deputy to the Vice President for Innovation at EPFL, where she led the Tech4Impact initiative connecting research, business, and entrepreneurship to drive sustainable innovation. She holds a PhD with summa cum laude honors from the Technical University of Munich. 

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2021 

Education: PhD summa cum laude from Technical University of Munich, MSc with distinction from University of Edinburgh 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: MBA module on Sustainable Transformation Strategies, MBA Elective on Systems Thinking, ESG Fundamentals in the EMBA 

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when … I first encountered IMD. Before that, I had always felt a tension between doing deep, rigorous academic work and actually making a difference in how organizations operate. I wasn’t satisfied with research that was published in important journals but never reached actual business leaders. But I also wasn’t really drawn to consulting or a job in the corporate world. IMD showed me a third path: working closely with senior leaders from around the world, on problems that are both intellectually challenging and practically relevant.  

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? My work is about making circularity real. Not as a feel-good corporate commitment, but as a genuine business strategy. The most significant thing we’ve built is a framework of five circular business model archetypes, paired with a Circular Pulse Check that helps companies honestly assess where they actually stand versus where they think they stand. The big reframe, and I think this is what makes our work distinct, is the shift from impact case to business case. Circularity isn’t something you do because it’s responsible. It’s something you do because it makes business sense. It makes you more resilient, more competitive, and less exposed. With geopolitical volatility reshaping global supply chains, that argument has never felt more urgent or more obvious. 

If I weren’t a business school professor… I’d be an entrepreneur. In many ways my job already feels like that: you start with an idea, test it in the room, iterate, throw it out, start again. I think I would chase that feeling regardless of context. But lately I’ve also been thinking a lot about politics. Bringing an entrepreneurial spirit to how we govern and make decisions as a society feels more needed than ever. Maybe one day! 

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? Honestly, I’d rather let others answer that, they probably see things I can’t. What I can say is that I work hard to make complexity feel accessible, even enjoyable. Sustainability is a topic that carries a lot of weight – moral, political, strategic – and people often arrive in the room already defensive or already converted. If someone leaves a session with a framework they’ll actually use or a question they hadn’t thought to ask before, I feel like I’ve done something worthwhile. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: That your job isn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It’s to orchestrate conditions for insightful discussion and collective learning to happen. The best sessions are rarely the ones where you’re at your most prepared or most articulate, but the ones where the room takes over.  

Professor I most admire and why: I have so many colleagues I admire that I genuinely wouldn’t want to single one out. But what the ones I admire most have in common is this: they bring a perspective that is completely their own, something you couldn’t get anywhere else. Their work is directly applicable. And they have a teaching style that is so distinctly theirs that the content becomes inseparable from the way it’s delivered. Maya Angelou said it best: people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel. The professors I most admire have truly mastered this. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? The collective aha. That moment when a room full of experienced, often skeptical, leaders suddenly sees something they couldn’t see five minutes earlier. You can feel the shift. I can’t manufacture that moment, but I can create the conditions for it and when it happens, there’s nothing quite like it.  

What is most challenging? People arrive in the room with very strong feelings about sustainability and they sit on completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Some are deeply passionate and want to move faster than any organization can realistically go. Others are skeptical, sometimes outright resistant, convinced it’s not their problem or frankly no problem at all. Getting those two groups to actually hear each other is already a challenge. But what I find hardest is shifting someone who came in firmly against it. Not by overwhelming them with data or making them feel judged, but by finding the one angle, the one business case, the one moment where something lands differently than they expected. This is the hardest part but also the most rewarding when it works. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Developmental. I use grades as an entry point into a conversation, it’s really the feedback that matters more than a number. 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? My two boys are two and six and they take up most of my time outside work and I love nothing more! We spend a lot of time outside together, at the lake, in the garden, riding bikes along Lake Geneva with the water on one side and the Alps on the other. Switzerland is a pretty special place to raise kids and reconnect with nature. In summer I play beach volleyball, in winter I ski and snowboard.  

How will you spend your summer? We’re taking our camping car through Italy and France. Lots of water, serious sandcastle building and wayyyy too much ice cream. The boys are at an age where a day at the water with a ball and a picnic is genuinely the best day possible. There will be long evenings outside with good friends, beautiful scenery, a glass of wine, and nothing urgent to do, which I fell is the biggest luxury of all. I’ll also be writing my next book somewhere in the margins of all that! I find it much easier to think when I’m away from the office and completely out of email range.  

Favorite place(s) to vacation: We go to Italy a lot as we have family there and I know the country from the inside, which is a completely different experience from visiting as a tourist. Tuscany is our base and the food alone is worth the trip, not to mention the beautiful scenery and historic villages. But in recent years we have also been exploring Latin America and every single trip has been a revelation. The warmth of the people, the colors, the nature, the energy of those places. And I love discovering the local food like Causa in Peru, Moqueca in Brazil, Marquesitas in Mexico, or Gallo Pinto in Costa Rica! And what strikes me more and more is how much the boys grow through these experiences, the curiosity they develop, the way they start noticing things, asking different questions, seeing that the world is much bigger and more varied than what they know. I grow too, honestly. Every trip changes us a little.

Favorite book(s): Right now it’s Harry Potter. I loved it as a teenager and am reading it again with my six-year-old, who is completely obsessed in the way that only six-year-olds can be. Beyond Hogwarts, I enjoy crime fiction, Jussi Adler-Olsen and Stieg Larsson for example. It may sound counterintuitive that I spend my days making the case for a more hopeful future for the planet and then spend my evenings reading about murders in frozen Scandinavian landscapes, but it does help me to unwind. 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? We rarely have time for TV and when we do the boys have already decided what’s on, so right now animal documentaries are a big part of my life. When I do get a moment to myself I’m a total contradiction: I love a good light romance with a happy ending just as much as a proper spy thriller. 

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? My taste is pretty broad and changes completely depending on my mood. But if I had to pick a favorite it’s Ludovico Einaudi,  I’ve seen him live twice and there is something about the way he brings the piano to life that is completely unique. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… Systems thinking. We are training the next generation of leaders to operate in a world that is deeply interconnected and increasingly complex. The leaders who will actually make a difference are the ones who can hold complexity, see across boundaries, and understand that every decision has ripple effects far beyond their spreadsheet. 

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at… Creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. The real challenge is that our entire economic framework is built around short-term thinking, so it’s not enough to simply tell leaders to think longer term. The more interesting question is how you make long-term thinking and stakeholder value actionable in environments entirely optimized for short-term shareholder gains. 

I’m grateful for… My health and my family – particularly my boys who make every day a little unpredictable and a lot of fun, and a partner who makes it all possible. And a job that I love where I get to think hard about problems that actually matter, with people who challenge me, and where I hope I can make a difference. Having all this is a rare combination and I am truly grateful for it every day. 

 

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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