Below you find more detailed descriptions of the current PhD Projects:
Simon Betschart's research focuses on the question of how an organization will move forward from a certain past to an unknown future. To answer this question, he considers three interwoven elements as crucial: Strategy, innovation, and management. Strategy work, and especially the formation and execution of strategic initiatives, figure as an important driver for an organization's future. Innovation enables an organization to develop new ideas and change (or reinforce) the path into the future. Management hereby figures as an important practice to make strategy and innovation actually happen.
For his research, Simon relies on a practice perspective: practices are collective and social patterns of action which are recurring over time. Practices integrate different levels of analysis (micro-meso-macro) and allow for a profound investigation of an organization on strong empirical grounds.
Within the practice perspective, Strategy as Practice (SAP) figures as a productive approach since it focuses on the actual doing of strategy work. SAP asks what actually happens when organizations engage in strategy work and hereby elaborates on concrete strategizing practices.
Simon tries to enrich the field of Strategy as Practice by shedding light on aspects of temporality in the strategy work of organizations. He is especially interested in the question of how an organization is able to strategically manage disruptive changes over time.
Simon is engaged in several empirical contexts. For his scientific work, he focuses on technology-driven engineering companies in a globalized context. The top management of these companies faces different challenges: translating the strategy "into" the organization, managing disruptive changes and digitalization, experimenting with new ways of organizing and innovating, and balancing geographic specialities in a global context. With his research, Simon is committed to generate relevance for the praxis in the context of these top management challenges.
Simon holds a B.A. in Social and Communication Studies from University of Lucerne (2010) and received his M. A. HSG in Management, Organization Studies and Cultural Theory (MOK) from University of St. Gallen in 2014. Since 2016, Simon is working with RISE in the context of his PhD studies.
Besides his research activities, Simon is working as a senior consultant in a management consultancy in Zurich. His focus lies on strategy development and implementation by mindfully taking into consideration organizational outcomes and hereby required developments.
Samuel Huber’s research focuses on how designing can inform strategizing and vice versa. He is especially interested in how materializing practices can support the strategy process of interdisciplinary partnerships or in other words, how diverse groups can find a common language through prototyping and experimentation to solve complex systemic challenges. By doing so, he can provide a valuable contribution to improve the way organizations collaborate and experiment together in order to create new opportunities in emerging ecosystems.
As he is deeply interested in the relationships, interactions and activities between different actors and artefacts, he heavily draws from the strategy-as-practice view. This theoretical and methodological package is further complemented by theoretical concepts from design and process theories.
His empirical context is constituted by an independent design firm, who partners up with different organizations to combine their abilities and collaboratively solve the increasingly complex challenges of their clients.
Samuel holds a M.A. in Management, Organization Studies and Cultural Theory from University of St. Gallen where he also took part in student placements at Stanford University and Keio University in Tokyo. He further holds a B.A. in Communication Science and Management & Economics from University of Zurich.
Next to his research activities, Samuel works as Strategy and Development Lead for design firm Goodpatch in Berlin and Tokyo and frequently talks on the topic of design strategy.
Christian Karaschewitz is interested in how organizations can renew themselves through product and process innovation. One of the most important sources of organizational change and innovation is thereby often overlooked: the bottom-up efforts of employees pursing potential innovative initiatives without formal assignments but for the benefit of the organization.
Therefore, his research is concerned with the question of how self-driven, dissident bottom-up innovation initiatives work and can be formalized in large, established organizations. More specifically, he is examining how intrapreneurial actors gain resources for their potentially innovative projects within an organization, which considers their activities as dissident or even counter-productive. The gained insights should be leveraged to contribute to the aforementioned challenge of how to manage these dissident innovation efforts.
The research project follows the conceptual understanding of intrapreneuring as the process of creating opportunities in an iterative enactment process of intrapreneurial actors in exchange with their organization and its environment. A practice-perspective is used to examine and theorize wayfinding practices as tactics during the process of intrapreneuring, which enable the pursuit of the dissident innovative projects within a corporate context.
The empirical data is provided in the context of a multi-national business software company. In this organization 6 dissident or partly dissident innovative initiatives are examined through qualitative means such as narrative interviews, diaries and observations.
Christian holds a B.A. and M.A. in Communication Studies in Social and Economic Contexts from the University of Arts in Berlin. Furthermore, Christian has been engaged in a one-year study at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Throughout his studies he has been a scholarship holder of the German Academic Foundation. Since summer 2018, Christian is working within the RISE team.
Next to his role as a management researcher at RISE, Christian is a Product Manager for business applications, designing and creating cloud software for use cases in the finance sector.
Benjamin Scher’s research focuses on different elements paying into the question of how managers and executives develop their own activities relavant for the future of their organization – more concretely, he studies how the collective of strategy-making actors develop their own strategy practice. He is particularly interested in the development and evolution of strategy tools, activities and processes in the context of uncertainty. This research is relevant for managers involved in strategy-making as it sheds light onto important questions on how managers can develop a collective ability for adaptive and effective strategy-making.
His primary scientific discourse lies in a practice perspective, especially in the strategy-as-practice school focusing on the concrete doings of strategists, their respective tools, and episodes of strategizing. He currently tries to enrich this field in three ways: Firstly, by focusing more on the development of strategizing practices in form of a processual-temporal dimension. Secondly, by connecting different levels of analysis (micro-meso-macro), thus supplementing the historically predominant micro studies. Thirdly, he emphasizes the importance of considering uncertainty as an important element in strategizing. He further considers the the resource-based view of the firm and evolutionary approaches to organizations as inspirational.
Currently, Benjamin is engaged in several empirical contexts. One the one hand, he focuses on organizations where the own strategy practice is explicitly confronted, under scrutiny and consequently like to develop. On the other hand, he studies the evolution of technology and mobility firms, especially engaged in the field of software development and autonomous driving.
Benjamin holds a B.A. in Global Economics and Management from Jacobs University Bremen where he also received valuable education in Psychology and Natural Sciences. Furthermore, he received a M.Sc. in Business, Major in Strategy from BI Norwegian Business School Oslo. Since winter 2016, Benjamin has been working with RISE. Throughout his studies, he has been a scholarship holder of the German Academic Foundation.
Besides, his research activities at RISE, Benjamin is a Strategy & Innovation Consultant supporting clients in shaping the future of mobility. He furthers teaches several courses on Strategy and Innovation at Jacobs University Bremen, gives public presentations on the field of future mobility, and is on the selection committee of the German Academic Foundation.
Additional information on the team members