Dr Nancy Bocken

Nancy Bocken is Professor in Sustainable Business & Circular Economy at Maastricht University, Maastricht Sustainability Institute (MSI), the Netherlands. She has coordinated various (inter)national research projects with a focus on business as the driver for sustainability transitions. Her research topics include sustainable business models, business experiments, circular economy, sufficiency, regeneration, and closing the 'idea-action' gap for sustainability through novel tools, methods and approaches.

Nancy Bocken is Professor in Sustainable Business & Circular Economy at Maastricht University, Maastricht Sustainability Institute (MSI), the Netherlands.

Nancy has coordinated various (inter)national research projects with a focus on business as the driver for sustainability transitions. Her research topics include sustainable business models, business experiments, circular economy, sufficiency, regeneration, and closing the 'idea-action' gap for sustainability through novel tools, methods and approaches. Amongst others, she leads Circular X, a €1.5m, seven-year research program funded by the ERC, about experimentation with circular business models in different country contexts.

Next to her main role, Nancy is Fellow at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, strategic advisory board member to TNO (Dutch association for applied scientific research), Independent Scientific Advisory Committee of the Global Circularity Protocol for Business of the WBCSD, and Member of the Supervisory Board of Circle Economy.  

From 2021-2025 she was a board and investment committee member of the Philips Foundation. Nancy co-founded her own circular business called HOMIE. She holds a PhD from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, which was fully funded by Unilever and focused on radically reducing product life cycle carbon emissions. She worked for University of Cambridge, Lund University Sweden, and TU Delft Netherlands, and was visiting fellow at Yale University, LUT Finland and Aalborg University, Denmark.

Currently she is visiting professor at NHH Norway’s Centre for Sustainable Business. Before, she worked for DHL, ING, and Accenture. Originally from the Netherlands, she has lived and worked in the UK, France, the USA, and Sweden.