About Jean-Jacques Degroof

Researcher, lecturer, and investor Jean-Jacques Degroof earned his doctorate degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2002. A native of Belgium, Degroof has served as President of the Board of the Degroof-Van Massenhove Foundation, a charitable organization based in Brussels, since September 2006. Degroof is a member of the editorial board of the Journal Revue Entreprendre & Innover and is also an affiliate researcher at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Industrial Performance Center and the Louvain School of Management at the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

Degroof served in the Belgian Army from 1981 to 1982 and trained in banking for several years at various financial institutions in both the United States and Belgium before working as a Human Resource Manager and Private Banking Manager for seven years at the Banque Degroof in Brussels. In 2002, Degroof held the position of researcher at the MIT Performance Center and participated in two major research projects. In 2003, he was named a CBG (Center for Business and Government) Fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government (now called the Mossavar-Rohani Center for Business and Government) of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Among his many publications, Degroof co-authored an article published in 2001 in the Science Technology Industry Review entitled, "An institutional and resource based explanation of growth patterns of research spin-offs in Europe." The paper was presented at the Babson Conference on Entrepreneurship Research in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where it was named Best Paper at the conference. In 2005, Jean-Jacques Degroof relocated to Europe, where he has continued to teach at academic institutions while pursuing private investment opportunities.