Full Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy

Robin Teigland

“The access to some of the smartest minds in the world in the natural sciences was something I wanted to truly explore, and Chalmers was the perfect place to do it.”

Since joining Chalmers, she has been developing a blue circular economy model that focuses on leveraging digital and material technologies to enable social sustainability and new jobs in coastal communities. It’s a project inspired by her children, all beginning with a surfing trip in Portugal around five years ago.

“We are using digital technologies to enable a transition to a more sustainable world,” she says. “We’ve worked with local fishermen, for example, to recycle fishing nets into high-quality products that are made with large-scale additive manufacturing technology. The goal is to create a network of microfactories — where industrial waste or local waste streams can be converted into secondary raw materials that can then be re-printed for the local market.”

Originally from the US, Robin Teigland completed her bachelor’s degree in economics at Stanford and landed a role in Silicon Valley during its early heydays. Having worked at banks, start-ups and prominent firms such as McKinsey and acquired her MBA at Wharton Business School, she has exposure to a vast network that was largely venturing into a strange new phenomenon in the 90s: the Internet.

After being promoted to professor at the Stockholm School of Economics, she was contacted by Chalmers, who had heard of her research in open-source software communities and the virtual space. Having permanently settled in Stockholm with five children, the prospect of moving to Gothenburg was daunting — but its close links to industry and in particular to manufacturing convinced her it was the right move.