About Me — Lisa Jones Christensen

Organizational Psychologist, Entrepreneurship Enthusiast & B-School Professor. I see trauma everywhere and I have good news about it.

I am Lisa Jones Christensen and I love all things academic. After working in investment banking and business development for a decade in Silicon Valley of the late 90s (it was a different place then), I pursued an MBA, a master’s degree in international development, and a PhD with two emphases. I started an international non-profit associated with microcredit and now I teach social and “regular” entrepreneurship in a business school. My work mixes the practical (real-world work life and realities of living in developing countries) with the academic (theoretical arguments about resilience and well-being and how entrepreneurship contributes to both). My favorite research project focused on the “high cost of free” in many developing countries. My research on clean drinking water innovations in rural Malawi showed that many people with very low incomes do not utilize or fully trust many free goods — in my study, they hoarded the goods but did not use them. People who paid a discount for a water-purification product, but who didn’t get it for free, used it the longest and with the most accuracy to keep water clean. I had to earn the trust of village chiefs and their families to do that project, and I had to keep a team of traveling researchers motivated to serve and listen and test drinking water in randomized households. Those were my…