Noa Gafni joins the Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation as Executive Director

The Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation (RICSI) at Rutgers Business School welcomes new Executive Director Noa Gafni to the organization’s leadership team. Gafni, a distinguished social impact leader and entrepreneur, was previously founder and CEO of Impact Squared, a social impact consultancy in London that was acquired by Dalberg Media.

She has served as a Global Leadership Fellow and Communications Head for the Global Shapers Community at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Head of Social Media at Hearst Magazines in New York, and founder of a social media network for women. She also serves as a Practitioner Fellow of Social Innovation at the University of Cambridge.

“We are privileged to have someone of Noa’s high caliber serving as Executive Director of the Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation,” said Gary Cohen, founder of the RICSI and Executive Vice President, Global Health at BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company).  “Her track record in driving positive social impact across the private, nonprofit, and academic sectors and her successful entrepreneurial experiences position her well to advance the mission of this new institute.”

Cohen, RC’80 and RBS’83, launched the RICSI to educate current and new generations of business leaders on integrating social innovation into their leadership strategies and agendas.

“We are building a forward-thinking business school that prepares students to drive both financial results and to be socially responsible,” said Lei Lei, dean of Rutgers Business School. “RICSI will be one of the main drivers that strengthen and sustain our goal of preparing students for leadership positions in these important competencies and practices.” RICSI was established in 2018.

“Noa will be integral in partnering Rutgers with progressive companies that view strong financial performance and positive societal impact as complementary rather than competing goals,” said Mike Barnett, Academic Director of RICSI and Professor of Management and Global Business.

“We are developing leading-edge business school curriculum on social innovation and sustainability and look forward to leveraging Noa’s strengths to bridge academia with industry,” said Jeana Wirtenberg, RICSI Co-director and Associate Professor of Professional Practice at Rutgers Business School.

Active in the social impact space, Gafni has worked extensively with the United Nations Foundation, UNICEF, and International Crisis Group and has had articles published in the New York Times, Huffington Post and Harvard Business Review. She holds a BA in Psychology from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the London Business School, and served as an adjunct professor at the NYU Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service, where she created curriculum that combined academic theory with case studies and guest lectures from experts in strategic management for public service organizations. She is an affiliate of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a Trustee at Forum for the Future, an international non-profit working group to solve complex sustainability challenges.

“I am honored and excited to take on the role of Executive Director of the RICSI. I strongly believe that business can be a force for good. I look forward to working with current and future business leaders, helping them to reimagine the role of the corporate sector and leverage business as a tool for addressing the world’s most pressing issues,” said Gafni.

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About the Rutgers Institute for Social Corporate Innovation (RICSI)

The Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation (RICSI) at Rutgers Business School is building a collaborative space in which the business leaders of today and tomorrow can learn how to create and implement profitable and sustainable business opportunities that help to resolve the world’s most intractable social problems.

The RICSI, centered in one of the world’s oldest, largest, most diverse, and most respected universities, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is well-positioned to develop a comprehensive and integrative curriculum that attracts and educates innovative future business leaders, and to bring together like-minded established business leaders who wish to connect with their peers, top scholars, and leaders in the nonprofit and government sectors. Together, we can disrupt and reinvent business models in order to better serve all stakeholders and society at large.