Research
Research Interests
Due to the profound changes currently taking place in the world, there is a need for leadership. Leadership enables a courageous journey into a seemingly unpredictable future and prevents people, organizations, or societies from becoming fearfully trapped.
What awaits us at the end of the path is connected with the notion of the “New”. The “New” is often reduced to the concept of “invention”. Formative for the expansion of this view was Joseph A. Schumpeter, who established the word “innovation”.
Innovations are much more than technological progresses. It rather also represents new ways of thinking and acting that are necessary to achieve a successful change. Here, the crucial element is not always the person who is thinking of or inventing something new, but rather the person who realizes the new.
Regardless of the social context, we can speak of “creative personalities”. With their active engagement, these individuals close the circle to the required leadership to initiate and drive the required change.
Leadership
This topic is not limited to any social system but encompasses a broad range of scientific issues originating in economics, politics, culture, and society. In terms of the business system, leadership is about the management of and in newly founded companies (entrepreneurship) but also about the development of leaders (leadership education) within corporate structures.
However, since leadership plays an important role in all areas of society, our research interests also relate to topics outside of economic aspects, not least in order to enable the interdisciplinary transfer of scientific findings. It also covers topics that arise in the course of digitalization (leadership in a digital world).
And finally, there is the challenge of how leaders can assess future trends and their influences on their own organization in an unsteady world and, in light of this, develop goals and strategies or scenarios up to “wildcards” for the long-term future (futurology).
Personality Development
No fields of research we are dealing with refer to any particular interpretation of how these are to be understood. Thus, “Personality” is seen as an interdisciplinary object of research that can be understood in many ways as a multifaceted term. In addition to a clear reference to business and the economy, the term also appears in other areas of society.
This research area deals in particular with the personality of executives, but is not limited to this. Leadership requires, on the one hand, individual dispositions and, on the other hand, legitimation by others. This topic therefore offers the possibility for interdisciplinary discourses dealing with the personal development of people. Another scientific focus is the development of competencies.
Innovation
This topic includes questions of futurology and its management: what is change, what are the causes and where could it lead? Innovation, as an answer to change, can occur in various forms: new or changed business models, new or changed technology, new or changed processes, new or changed ways of thinking. Accordingly, the concept of innovation can be found in all social systems.
The area of “innovation quality” questions, whether the introduction of an innovation has a concrete benefit. According to Schumpeter, innovations are created by “combining factors in a new way” and in the “implementation of the new combination”, so that the term “transfer” plays a major role. Transfer research deals with the question of how innovations are created and which factors are beneficial. Another focus is on the research of networks.
