The Research Relay

In the Research Relay, we invite researchers to briefly share their work in the field of social innovation. Through this series, we aim to highlight both the breadth and depth of the field, ranging from social change and sustainable development to new solutions for complex social challenges. Here, you’ll meet researchers with different perspectives, motivations, and questions that demonstrate how their work contributes to new knowledge and new opportunities. After each profile, the researcher passes the baton to a new colleague at another institution.

Örebro University

Karin Berglund

Since January 2025, Karin Berglund has been a professor of sustainable business at the School of Business and Economics at Örebro University. Karin conducts research on entrepreneurship as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon, where new ideas emerge in the spaces between sectors and established norms. She explores how entrepreneurial initiatives can open up new ways of thinking, organizing, and imagining the future, and why real change sometimes requires us to both build something new and dismantle the old.

More about Karin Berglund

Umeå University

Maxim Vlasov

Maxim Vlasov is a researcher and practitioner with a strong commitment to humanity’s relationship with nature and its significance for our collective survival in an era of ecological crises. He is affiliated with the School of Business and Economics at Umeå University, where he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the new green wave and serves as a senior lecturer, as well as a researcher at the Center for Nature Interpretation at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences.

More about Maxim Vlasov