Wolfgang Spiess-Knafl

Wolfgang studied management engineering at the University of Technology in Vienna with two academic years spent at PUC Rio de Janeiro and INSA Rouen. He started his career as an analyst in the investment banking division of Morgan Stanley. In 2009 he began working on his doctoral studies with a focus on social finance at the Chair for Entrepreneurial Finance at the Technische Universität München which he completed in 2012. Until 2016 he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Civil Society Center and the Chair for Strategic Organization and Financing at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen focusing on social finance, impact investing and social innovation. In this time he worked on a national mapping of social enterprises, an ex-ante evaluation on imperfections in the social investment market and a study for the German Federal Ministry of Economy Affairs and Energy.

Since 2016 he worked on the development of the social finance market for the European Commission and FEBEA, conducted studies on social finance for the Association of German Foundations, NEOS Lab and European Liberal Forum among others. He has also written “Impact Investing” published with Palgrave Macmillan and "Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain for Social Impact" with Routledge. Since 2019 he is part of the European Center for Social Finance.