Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation and Entrepreneurship - Prof. dr. Aard J. Groen

Masters involved:

Double Diploma UT MSc BA with TU Berlin MSc I&E and BA and IE&M

Contributing Institutes: IGS

In today’s world, companies have to innovate in order to survive in the long term. As a consequence, managing innovation has become one of the key strategic tasks facing organizations of all shapes, sizes and sectors. Technological and societal dynamics are mirrored in market dynamics. For incumbent firms, existing value creation patterns need innovation, whereas, at the same time, efficiency is tested in extremely competitive international markets. Entrepreneurs recognize new opportunities, leading to major disruptions in the market. Popular concepts such as the exploration-exploitation dilemma and open innovation indicate that the traditional atomistic approaches of individual organizations are no longer sufficient. In the Innovation & Entrepreneurship research program we adopt a multi-actor, multi-level perspective to study the processes of innovation, entrepreneurship and new business development. Our empirical base is oriented towards university-industry relations, the high-tech industry, the health care industry, and the manufacturing & construction industry with an emerging focus on Services and ICT. Central element of much of our research is the development of new technologies enabling improved value creation.

The main purpose of our research program is to enhance our theoretical and practical understanding of the organization and management of innovation, entrepreneurial and business development processes and strategies at different levels (i.e. network and firm level).