A venture investor who works in Boston and Brussels, Jean-Jacques Degroof leverages an extensive background as an entrepreneurship professor to teach innovation management at a range of European business schools. Jean-Jacques Degroof has a strong interest in the social applications of economics, which was underlined by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ recent selection of three researchers who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

As reported in the Financial Times, the recipients have each focused their life work on “the causes and remedies for poverty.” This stands in stark contrast with a popular image of academic economists who are too involved in abstract models of their own making to have a real-world impact. Apparent failures include the neglect of growing world inequalities and an inability to predict major world challenges such as the financial crisis of a decade ago.

As underlined in the article, the vital work of Abhijit Banerjee, a Professor at MIT, Michael Kremer, a Professor at Harvard University, and Esther Duflo, also a Professor at MIT, demonstrates that top-level economists continue to focus on the “fundamental economic problem” of how to ensure that people have access to life’s necessities.

The work for which they were honored involved field experiments conducted in controlled, but real-world environments that provided a credible way of measuring the factors that contribute to poverty and inequality.