Current Projects

Project coordination: Dr. Simone Schweiger

Absorptive capacity – a firm’s ability to acquire, process, and apply new knowledge – is widely recognized as a key driver of innovation and competitiveness. We explore how the different dimensions of absorptive capacity (acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation) contribute to innovation performance, how they interact, and how firms can build routines that make the most of new knowledge. Beyond internal processes, we also investigate how external knowledge environments shape the value of absorptive capacity. Factors such as digital connectivity, intellectual property protection, or industry characteristics influence how effectively firms can turn knowledge into innovation. By combining insights across studies, this project aims to deepen the understanding of absorptive capacity as a dynamic capability and to show how organizations can leverage it to strengthen innovation and long-term success.

Project coordination: Prof. Dr. Philipp Sieger

We seek to better understand how established companies can remain entrepreneurial in the long run (or become more entrepreneurial again). Therefore, we investigate several related topics like portfolio entrepreneurship, strategic entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial orientation, franchising, and decision-making. Also, we are interested in how firms can overcome survival-threatening crises, for instance by examining turnaround strategies or the performance consequences of unplanned successions.

Project coordination: Glenn Hauser

Our research focuses on corporate divestitures, which are strategic decisions by multi-business firms to sell, spin off, carve out, or split up some of their business units or subsidiaries. They are often undertaken, as can be observed in today‘s volatile business context, as a response to external pressures such as competitive dynamics or political changes, as well as internal pressures related to performance, strategic realignment, or resource allocation. In our work, we aim to advance our understanding of the antecedents that drive firms to divest, the implications of these decisions for organizational performance and diverse stakeholders, and the post-divestiture strategies.

Project coordination: Dr. Fabian Mändli

Media exposure, particularly negative exposure, has strong implications for firms, among others on social evaluations such as reputation and stigma. In this project, we are looking at potential dynamic effects of media exposure. If initial negative media exposure has an effect on the likelihood of subsequent negative media exposure, threats of negative exposure by the media and/or associated activist campaigns that aim at garnering media attention are much more pressing for firms. At the same time, these dynamics might additionally deter companies from engaging in unethical or polluting behaviour, and/or lead them to strategically interfering with public discourse, for example by proactively emitting press releases, in order to dampen the dynamic effects. We test these predictions using panel-data with granular monthly observations of media exposure over a 30-year period. We further discuss the impacts of these dynamic effects on current theorizing of media exposure.

Project coordination: Shanjey Rajakumar

Our research focuses on corporate venture capital (CVC), which refers to equity investments made by established companies in external innovative firms, often startups or young ventures. These investments are driven by both strategic and financial goals. In an increasingly dynamic and uncertain business environment, firms turn to CVC to access external innovation, respond to technological change, and explore new growth opportunities. In our work, we aim to understand the antecedents that lead firms to engage in CVC and to examine the outcomes these investments generate for both the investing companies and the ventures they support.

Project coordination: Amelie Gschwinder

Entrepreneurship is both a salutogenic and pathogenic process: while many entrepreneurs report high satisfaction with their work and lives, they are also highly vulnerable to stress, burnout, and other forms of ill-being. Although scholarly interest in entrepreneurial well-being has increased in recent years, research on its consequences remains limited. This project contributes to the 'business-case for well-being' by examining how both well-being and ill-being shape key entrepreneurial outcomes such as creativity, venture growth, and persistence. We place particular emphasis on their dynamic nature, recognizing that entrepreneurial well-being and ill-being are not static but fluctuate across the different stages of the entrepreneurial process and throughout the venture lifecycle.

Project coordination: Prof. Dr. Philipp Sieger

We investigate several important topics in the context of new venture creation in order to better understand why and how individuals create new businesses. Examples are founder social identities, causal and effectual decision-making logics, the nascent-active gap, entrepreneurial teams, and new venture performance. Here, we mostly conduct quantitative studies using large-scale global datasets (e.g., from the GUESSS project, one of the largest research projects on student entrepreneurship that we organize jointly with the University of St.Gallen). 

http://www.guesssurvey.org/

Project coordination: Dr. Simone Schweiger

This research project investigates how firms can align their strategic orientations to achieve superior performance. In management research, entrepreneurial, market, and learning orientations have been studied extensively. Our work shows that these orientations are not only beneficial individually, but that their complementarity generates synergies—firms perform best when they simultaneously explore new opportunities, adapt to customer and competitor dynamics, and systematically absorb and apply knowledge. Building on this idea, we conceptualize strategic orientation coalignment as the coherent integration of entrepreneurial, market, learning, and innovation orientations. Coalignment requires more than just aligning strategies, it depends on organizational structures and control mechanisms that ensure consistency across business units. Specifically, coordination, formalization, and centralization help firms overcome bounded rationality, fragmented decision-making, and internal conflict. By analyzing different perspectives of strategic fit, such as covariation, moderation, mediation, and profile deviation, we show that superior performance emerges when orientations and structures are deliberately orchestrated into a coherent system.