We focus on four main research areas:
The following lists exemplary research projects:
Platforms-based business models transformed the nature and pursuit of entrepreneurship in many industries. This can be seen at companies like Uber transforming the market for ride hailing. With our team of scholars we want to shed light on the effects the design of platform ecosystems has on entrepreneurs building such platforms by their own, but also utilizing platforms of third party providers.
Over the past decades, open source software became increasingly important in business models of commercial companies. Research lacks so far the ability to explain the effects the increase in commercial involvement might have on open source software projects. With this research project we aim to close this gap and observe how commercial companies take part in open source software projects, how they interact with other contributors and how their involvement affects long term success of open source software projects.
This project analyzes considers general changes in the role of founders when the firm progresses along the life cycle. Moreover, we investigate consequences of the founder's choice whether to remain active in research or to focus on the general management of the firm. Given the high importance of emerging firms’ success for the performance of national economies, a deeper understanding of how a continuing involvement of founders in the research process influences innovation output and firm success is warranted.
Established companies engage in diverse forms of corporate venturing to access ventures' technologies and profit from its entrepreneurial spirit. We are interested in the performance implications of various forms of engagement and implied timing of activities. Particularly, the timing aspect is an important determinant when analysing financial as well as technological returns occurring to CVC investors.
We aim to contribute to the debate of the optimal design of institutional transfer centers and to mechanisms encouraging scientists to engage in tranfer activities.
At the interface between innovation and entrepreneurship our interest is in learning about the motivation of scientists to become entrepreneurs and in examining how high-technology ventures build organisational and financial structures as well as strategies to remain at the forefront of science and be commercially successful.
Organisations simultaneously have to increase efficiency and innovate radically to ensure success in the short- and long-term. We examine how social networks help to solve this tension. Networks may improve flexibility and the coordination of activities, enable self-organisation of employees and intensify the use of knowledge.
The new model of collaborative organisation raises many questions regarding structure and performance impact that seek for scientific answers.
We investigate how firms' technological capabilities and the choice of collaboration partners impact the importance of alliances for successful innovation and firm performance. In addition, we are interested in the contractual structure of alliances, i.e., the role of bargaining power, how rights are traded against each other.
In the presence of asymmetric information, economic agents need to communicate their quality to investors and other parties. In our research we develop conceptual frameworks that improve institutionalised signaling and certification processes.
Openness and free information sharing amongst scientists are supposed to be core norms of the academic community. In the area of university-industry linkage we study the impact of the increased propertisation of public science on the knowledge sharing behaviour of scientists. In addition, we examine trends such as Crowdscience and Crowdsourcing.
We aim to contribute to a better understanding of the system of science. In doing so, we analyse the division of work between scientists, the concept of authorship and inventorship over time.
