Prof. Dr. Christian Stummer

Christian Stummer holds the Chair of Innovation and Technology Management at the Faculty of Business and Economics at Bielefeld University. Currently, he also serves as the managing director of this faculty’s Research Institute for Technological Innovation, Market Development, and Entrepreneurship (iTIME), the academic director of the university’s Centre of Entrepreneurship (ZUg), the chair of the “Management” profile in the Bielefeld Graduate School of Business and Economics (BiGSEM), and the vice dean of the Faculty.

He received a master’s degree in business informatics from the University of Vienna and Technical University of Vienna in 1993, a doctoral degree in economics and social sciences from the University of Vienna in 1998, and a venia docendi (habilitation) in business administration from the University of Vienna in 2003. During the time as a researcher at the Department of Business Administration at the University of Vienna (starting in 1994), Christian Stummer also was the Head of the Research Group “Digital Business (dbiz)” at the private-public partnership Electronic Commerce Competence Center (EC3) in Vienna, set up a research group of his own, financed through third-party research funds, stayed for a year as a visiting associate professor of research at the Department of Management Science and Statistics at the University of Texas at San Antonio (financed through the Austrian Science Fund), and served as the director of studies as well as the vice dean of the Faculty of Business, Economics, and Statistics. In 2010, he was appointed full professor (W3) for the newly established Chair of Innovation and Technology Management at Bielefeld University.

His research interests comprise economic implications of smart products and services (e.g., corresponding business model innovations, smartness barriers), market diffusion of innovations and technologies (e.g., planning the market introduction of new products, multi-generation technology succession, path dependencies in the development of dominant designs), issues arising from the cooperation between market players in developing new products or services (e.g., between an incumbent firm and a startup company or between universities and industry), further challenges of managing research and development (e.g., R&D project selection and resource allocation), and the growth of digital platforms (e.g., measures for overcoming the chicken-and-egg problem when establishing a two-sided platform). In order to address these topics, various methods are applied (and combined, if necessary), which include agent-based market simulation, quantitative empirical studies (mostly based on vignette studies), qualitative empirical studies (e.g., interviews and/or case studies), and mathematical modeling of real-world problems and (interactive) decision support.

Christian Stummer has published more than 120 scientific papers. In serving the scientific community, he was the Chair of the Working Group on “Simulation and Optimization of Complex Systems” of the German Operations Research Society (GOR), is the Co-Editor of the Central European Journal of Operations Research, has managed special issues for several scientific journals, and has provided reviews for more than fifty journals and several research agencies.