The Search for Impact through Entrepreneurship

Meet Postdoc at ITU, former Industrial PhD at CBS DIGI, Anika Schroder, a food nerd with a passion for tackling food waste. She’s working on how to turn food industry waste streams into high-value products using digital solutions to drive new forms of innovation.Her research focuses on digital sustainability: exploring how digital technologies can connect food producers with the right partners to make better use of what would otherwise go to waste. Because often, the challenge isn’t the technology, it’s coordination.

Meet Associate Professor Morten Holm from the Department of Accounting at Copenhagen Business School. Morten's research and former corporate career focused on financial value creation.Ten years ago, Morten's research helped a bank develop and implement a novel advisory concept in business banking. It worked so well, they still use it today. Then last year, another bank approached him asking for a similar system based on his work.That’s when the penny dropped: “Maybe this shouldn’t stay in the drawer. Maybe it’s time to leverage my research and build a modern solution for business banking advisory that all banks may benefit from?”Morten applied for Proof-of-Concept grants at CBS and started working with Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship. Now he is testing with his first client. Listen to his journey here.

Meet PhD Henrik Axelsen from the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School.  In December 2025, he received an Innoexplorer grant for his project: "Decentralized AI utility for financial crime compliance."Henrik calls himself 'a corporate dropout'. After a long career in large corporations mainly within the financial sector, Henrik did a PhD, followed by a postdoc position with the clear vision to become an entrepreneur within the field.Money laundering is a massive global challenge, currently fought by individual banks working in silos. The criminals work in networks, but their compliance counterparts often work alone. What if we could collaborate across banks using AI to find the real criminals faster and smarter?

Meet PhD student Sebastian Ahlstich, who, together with assistant professor Jan Stuckatz, has received the first-ever Innoexplorer Grant at CBS from Innovationsfonden. Their project explores how international trade agreements can be made more effective and accessible, with real-world implications for firms, policymakers, and global trade governance.Hear how Sebastian’s impact journey began and how his skills have developed over time across many European countries. How did his interest in preferential trade agreements emerge? And why does he believe that this 'market failure' could be relevant to address?

Meet Agnes Günther, PhD, founder of Netsocietal and ATELOS.Hear how Agnes is driven by making a positive difference to society. For her, economic prosperity and societal impact are inseparable. Yet, today, companies’ value creation and ‘doing good’ for society are seen separately and too often understood as opposites. Her ambition is to break down the siloed thinking, which is a barrier to solving some of the most difficult challenges of our time: green transformation, European competitiveness, and new forms of value creation and appropriation. For that, Agnes is a proponent of addressing challenges horizontally and working across the value chains to understand the bigger picture that is needed for systemic transformations. Agnes lives for ideas and is keen on bringing in new perspectives. At the same time, she works data-driven and science-based. She feels comfortable in the tension between creativity and newness, rigour and facts.Among her clients, we find some of the biggest Danish foundations, public institutions, and entire industry organisations eager to create real impact with their investments.

The Digital Frontier of Accounting with Joachim Elmegaard Meet PhD Joachim Elmegaard, external lecturer at CBS ACC, and founder of Captier. Hear how Joachim is developing a scalable, shelf-automated software for auditors to turn messy client data into smooth, automated workflows. Created by auditors for auditors with a special focus on SMEs. Based on Joachim's domain expertise, research at CBS and his career in the private industry, his dream is to support auditors with automated audit software, to get away from standard operations being able focus more on strategy and future development of the company instead of basic compliance.

Micro changes are the small, everyday changes that often disturb employees much more than big strategic ones. The focus of Signe's work is to understand the mechanisms and how to navigate them. Signe is the founder of enlighten (in 2021), keynote speaker and writer of several books about micro changes in organisations. She holds a PhD from CBS, Department of Organization, where she did her industrial PhD together with a large bank, where she also worked in the field of organizational and leadership development for more than ten years. Today, she is also an external lecturer at CBS, and she values the mix of academia and business in her work life.

Meet Vice Dean of Innovation & Impact at Copenhagen Business School, Morten Irgens. Morten is responsible for the Impact and Innovation Agenda at CBS. But he also has extensive startup experience and founded an AI company, way before it was hot. Morten's career started in entrepreneurship. After ten years in Canada, the company was sold, and Morten returned to Norway, where he supported several universities in defining how they, as a university, can play an increased role within the innovation and impact agenda; and thus, benefit society to an even larger extent than through research and education.He has worked in academia ever since. Two years ago, he joined CBS and our dialogue centres around his ambitions to support the increased impact of CBS’s research and thus influence on society and the world.

Meet Dr. Thomas Zöega Ramsøy, former CBS Marketing researcher and founder of Neurons.A profound interest in the human brain has driven Thomas’s search for answers for many years through several disciplines. Why are we – humans - behaving the strange way we are? Neuro phycology, study of consciousness, emotional responses, design of metrics to understand the mind and brain better, combined with marketing and business studies has led to the 10-year-old company, Neurons, a world leading company, which today through advanced AI tools can predict how we register, remember, and evaluate what we are exposed to in any type of communication. And it does not stop here. Thomas’s curiosity keeps pushing the barriers of what is possible.

Meet PhD Stig Strandbæk Nyman, postdoc at CBS DIGI and founder of Labour Analytics.In a nutshell, Stig’s work is to create data tools for workers. As our work is being increasingly digitised, data analytics is becoming part of any toolbox. However, until now, data has primarily been a tool for management. Labour Analytics aim at creating data tools for workers and their unions to improve worker conditions and level the playing field between managers and workers when it comes to data. Listen how Stig is creating a sandbox to co-create tools with the unions.