ABOUT
Simon was born and raised in Belgium. Following primary and secondary school, he initially studied Commercial Engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven after which he moved to Nottingham to specialize in Corporate Social Responsibility, from which he graduated in 2007. After a gap year in South America where he learnt Spanish, he temped in Belgium while pursuing a professional degree in French as a commercial agent in international business. In 2009 he started work as a sustainable innovation consultant and in 2011, he moved to London to pursue his PhD in Innovation Management at Imperial College London.
Simon was born and raised in Belgium. Following primary and secondary school, he initially studied Commercial Engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven after which he moved to Nottingham to specialize in Corporate Social Responsibility, from which he graduated in 2007. After a gap year in South America where he learnt Spanish, he temped in Belgium while pursuing a professional degree in French as a commercial agent in international business. In 2009 he started work as a sustainable innovation consultant and in 2011, he moved to London to pursue his PhD in Innovation Management at Imperial College London.
In 2015, Simon joined Singapore Management University, initially as a postdoc and mid 2016 as a tenure track professor in the Strategy and Entrepreneurship group. Following a successful grant application to study innovation in the natural world, Simon hired Ryan Merrill, a talented postdoc who just graduated from USC with a PhD in energy policy. One of their case studies – a mangrove restoration NGO in Myanmar – led to the foundation of his first startup in 2018, Global Mangrove Trust (GMT), a non-profit ecosystem coordinator that develops and manages large scale mangrove restoration projects in Southeast Asia and is on a mission to put a conservation easement around every single mangrove in the world.
In 2015, Simon joined Singapore Management University, initially as a postdoc and mid 2016 as a tenure track professor in the Strategy and Entrepreneurship group. Following a successful grant application to study innovation in the natural world, Simon hired Ryan Merrill, a talented postdoc who just graduated from USC with a PhD in energy policy. One of their case studies – a mangrove restoration NGO in Myanmar – led to the foundation of his first startup in 2018, Global Mangrove Trust (GMT), a non-profit ecosystem coordinator that develops and manages large scale mangrove restoration projects in Southeast Asia and is on a mission to put a conservation easement around every single mangrove in the world.
About a year into the work with GMT, which included a commissioned thought leadership piece written for the UN and DBS Bank, Simon and Ryan started working with one of Simon’s oldest friends in Singapore, Mathias Boissonot, a talented systems engineer and entrepreneur who had gotten interested in the technology part of the mangrove work GMT had been doing (remote sensing, blockchain architecture). This collaboration eventually sparked the beginning of Handprint, a digital tech platform that empowers companies to imbue every phase of the customer value chain with positive impact. Handprint has raised over 3M in pre-series A investment from amongst others Thunes (fintech), Singtel Innov8 (Corporate VC of the largest Telco in Singapore), and works with companies like FedEx, DBS Bank, Traveloka, and Idemia
About a year into the work with GMT, which included a commissioned thought leadership piece written for the UN and DBS Bank, Simon and Ryan started working with one of Simon’s oldest friends in Singapore, Mathias Boissonot, a talented systems engineer and entrepreneur who had gotten interested in the technology part of the mangrove work GMT had been doing (remote sensing, blockchain architecture). This collaboration eventually sparked the beginning of Handprint, a digital tech platform that empowers companies to imbue every phase of the customer value chain with positive impact. Handprint has raised over 3M in pre-series A investment from amongst others Thunes (fintech), Singtel Innov8 (Corporate VC of the largest Telco in Singapore), and works with companies like FedEx, DBS Bank, Traveloka, and Idemia