Prof Dr Othmar M. Lehner DSc MBA
Professorial Fellow, Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, University of Oxford,
Director, ACRN Oxford Research Centre,
Professor, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria,
Visiting Academic Professor, SAID Business School, University of Oxford
Othmar.Lehner@sbs.ox.ac.uk
Summary
Prof. Othmar M. Lehner is a full professor of Finance and Risk at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, a position he has held since 2008, a professorial fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford and a long-term visiting academic professor in social finance and entrepreneurship at the SAID Business School of the University of Oxford. He was previously a senior lecturer of Social Entrepreneurship and Research Methodology at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland for four years.
He studied at the University of Linz, Austria and at the University of London, with semesters abroad at Georgetown University and at the VU Amsterdam. After graduation, he went into a professional career, working as CPA and bank manager in the field of risk management for more than 10 years, before he continued his academic calling at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland in a joint program with Stanford University CA. Here he completed one of the first research based Doctor of Science degrees at that time in Social Finance and Social Entrepreneurship, examined by Prof. Johanna Mair, Stanford University and Prof. Kai Hockerts, Copenhagen Business School.
His research interests are social and sustainable finance; more specifically the motivations and the interplay of the different players in the field, and moreover the impact of public policy and accounting instruments on its formation. In 2011 he was a guest at Harvard, MA in the research group assisting the Obama administration in creating the JOBS act with legislation on Equity Crowdfunding.
He serves as director at the ACRN Oxford Research Centre, in which Dr. Lehner currently leads a consortium aiming to explore and to provide advisory services to policy leaders on the dimensions of social finance and impact investing. He is also the permanent chair of the annual FRAP conference series of Finance, Risk and Accounting Perspectives, and serves as associate editor of the Routledge Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment and of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship.
Dr. Lehner is extensively published in his field and a regular visiting scholar and lecturer in the MBA and PhD programmes of Heidelberg, New York, Cambridge, Oxford and London Universities. His latest project is the editorship of the Taylor and Francis, Routledge Handbook of Social and Sustainable Finance, forthcoming in 2015.