Biography
Zorica Zagorac is a Lecturer and Project Lead in Leadership, Strategy, and Organizational Change. She supports leaders, teams, and organizations in addressing complex challenges and strengthening their leadership, innovation, and change capabilities. Her work spans public, private, and socially oriented organizations.
Her research focuses on Leadership Cognition and Behavioral Change. She investigates how cognitive abilities and individual behaviors influence leadership, decision-making, and organizational learning. Her research interests also include entrepreneurial creativity, as well as leadership and governance in complex environments and when navigating competing goals. Building on her research, she develops scientifically grounded training programs and interventions to strengthen leadership, decision-making, and learning capabilities.
In her consulting work, she combines scientific insights with extensive management experience to develop practice-oriented approaches to leadership and organizational development. A central focus is on advancing ways of thinking and acting to enable individuals and organizations to leverage uncertainty, complexity, and change.
Education and Professional Background
After completing her bachelor's degree in International Management in 2006, Zorica Zagorac gained several years of industry experience. At Hilti, she implemented a global change initiative in Retail Strategy as a Project and Process Manager. She subsequently worked as a Category Manager at Huber Holding and later in business development within her family's electronics company.
Her interest in the ability of individuals and organizations to change and reinvent themselves led her back to academia. She completed her master's degree in Business and Economics at the University of Liechtenstein in 2013 and earned her PhD in 2018 with a dissertation on entrepreneurial creativity. Research visits took her to the University of South Australia, Stanford University, and ETH Zurich.
From 2018 to 2026, she conducted research and taught at ETH Zurich's Chair of Technology and Innovation Management (TIM Group) and the Lab for Cognition, Learning and Adaptive Behavior (COLAB), initially as a Postdoctoral Researcher and later as a Senior Researcher and Lecturer (Oberassistentin). Her research projects included a study funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), conducted in collaboration with officer training schools of the Swiss Armed Forces, focusing on the development of cognitive flexibility in dynamic problem-solving and decision-making tasks. She was also involved in an international research project examining leadership and governance in managing multiple, competing goals.
Zorica Zagorac has extensive teaching experience at the bachelor's, master's, doctoral, and executive education levels. She contributed to the development of the joint Executive MBA in General Management program offered by ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen, for which she designed Leadership Skills Labs on Creative Thinking and Systems Thinking. Since 2024, she has taught Innovation in Healthcare at the University of St. Gallen and, since 2026, has served as a Leadership Coach in the MBA program at its Executive School.
Since 2026, Zorica Zagorac has been a Lecturer and Project Lead at the Competence Center for Public & Nonprofit Management at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. Her work encompasses research, teaching, and consulting services, with a focus on Leadership, Strategy, and Organizational Development. She also maintains her affiliation with ETH Zurich's Lab for Cognition, Learning and Adaptive Behavior.
