Professor Stelvia Matos

Stelvia is a Reader (Associate Professor) in Social Innovation & Sustainability Management and Head of the Centre for Social Innovation Management at Surrey Business School. Her research focuses on understanding the complex interactions among social, environmental and economic factors, and how they affect and are affected by innovation dynamics, entrepreneurial behaviour and policy development. This includes the difficult process of responding to technological and social change through innovation, which can be conceptualized as a panacea and paradox - a main driver of social improvement but also the cause of many problems faced by society.

She is actively engaged in research concerned with emerging economies, poverty reduction and inequality, sustainable development innovation, innovation for social inclusion, sustainable supply chains and global health challenges. Her publications have implications for both theory and practice, and the vast majority involved data collection in low-income and/or marginalized communities, with implications for industry, NGOs and governmental policy. Her connections with top Brazilian universities allow Stelvia to develop research that will influence government policy and management practice around social inclusion, and potential unanticipated outcomes of innovation and entrepreneurship.  An example includes her current research on Traceability technologies in developing country contexts using Blockchain. Deforestation-free products traceability is currently central to trade agreements between the EU and Mercosul (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). 

The CSIM is a multidisciplinary research centre focusing on societal grand challenges. With over 30 members from a wide range of disciplines including Business and Management, Economics, Psychology, Law, Medicine and Engineering, the CSIM works as a platform to support university-wide multidisciplinary research focusing on innovation as a force for good. The CSIM collaborates with external partners such as University of Sao Paulo (USP), Foundation Getulio Vargas (FGV) and University of Fortaleza in Brazil, Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Science Policy research Unit (SPRU), University of Sussex Business School. Research projects are related (but not restricted) to four relevant and urgent research areas: Climate Change, Global Health Challenges, Digital Economy & Sustainability, and Entrepreneurship for social inclusion.

Stelvia’s roles as co-editor-in-chief of Technovation, Head of the CSIM and publication track record has allowed her to develop a strong reputation within the international academic community. She has been invited to be part of the senior editorial board of a reputable Brazilian Journal and she is often invited to participate as a keynote at conferences and workshops organized by top Brazilian and Chinese academic institutions such as USP, FGV, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in which she takes the opportunity to exert a positive influence on these countries’ academic development. For many years she has advocated careful consideration of unintended consequences of innovation, sustainable supply chains, as well as entrepreneurial policies for social inclusion in developing countries (see for example her publications in Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, Journal of Management Studies, International Journal of Operations and Production Management). She has also stressed the importance of contextualized methodology in developing countries’ management research (as opposed to using Global North methods as templates). This has resulted in for example the recent co-authored British Journal of Management article, and she plans to develop these ideas further with Indian, Brazilian and Chinese scholars.