Richard is part of the advisory board in Human Material Loop since May 2024, with focus on impact business modeling and fundraising. Richard Georg Engström is a seasoned Nordic serial entrepreneur active since the mid-1990s in technology, sustainability, and impact investing. He founded the Impact Business Modeling System™ and has as of 2025 advised and coached around 300 impact startups, assessed over 8,000 ventures, and matches them with hundreds of international impact investors to drive measurable social and environmental change. He's a published writer within business and sustainability, and co-author of a book on regeneration in leadership and business development. Richard lives with his wife and two grown up kids in Copenhagen, Denmark, and spends his spare time in a mix of skiing, winter bathing and reading books about history, global politics and philosophy in the winter season, and during summer he loves to windsurf, snorkel, take an early swim he sea at sunrise, hike the woods and lie in the hammock in the family summerhouse in the Swedish forest and read even more books.
The Nordics, with Sweden taking the lead, has for three decades built a strong innovation ecosystem for startups and investors that has brought unicorns such as Spotify, Minecraft and Klarna. It represents 7 percent of global billion-dollar tech exits, though the Nordic countries only have about 2 percent of global GDP.