Bachelor or Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
Germany is a country shaped by the automotive industry. However, in recent years those automakers seem to have lost their competitive edge in developing cars with new technologies. Electric cars and also autonomous driving made it into the mainstream - research and industry more or less accept that. It is however unclear how the business models of the automakers, OEMs, other suppliers, and new mobility providers will develop. Customer preferences change, digital business models are more profitable, and mobility becomes a topic defined not only by the personal car but many other means of transport such as car sharing, public transport, scooters, bikes etc.
From this change you should develop a hypothesis how relevant stakeholders will change, which might vanish and which can fill the gaps. Other questions could be: What technologies will be developed? How will automakers change? Will there be a true mobility shift? Can manufacturers stick to their business models or must they become technology companies? How might Germany develop compared to other countries? What can we learn from new automakers and other mobility start-ups? What tools, trends, and technologies will shape the German automotive industry?
🦾Who we are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focussed on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We want to always be early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future.
🎯 Goals
- Systematically research and identify the most important trends for the automotive and mobility industry
- Searchstartups worldwide that aim to disrupt automotive and mobility landscape
- Prepare: a) thesis/project study report b) Powerpoint slides on the topic of your thesis/project study c) Infograph that contains most important results d) medium article/executive summary to be shared with the public
We would particularly welcome innovative ideas on how to identify future trends and future business models for the automotve industry, e.g. collecting data from twitter or other digital sources that talk about trends or startups through worldwide VC portfolios, e.g. crunchbase, linkedin, etc.
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Interest in Automotive / Mobility / Business / Technology
- Passion to learn more about the future of mobility and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
Building the automtotive industry of 2030 by Oliver Wyman: https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2019/jun/automotive-manager-2019/cover-story/building-the-automotive-industry-of-2030.html
Automotive trends 2019 by PwC: https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/gx/en/insights/industry-trends/2019-automotive.html
Disruptive trends that will transform the auto industry by McKinsey: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/disruptive-trends-that-will-transform-the-auto-industry
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. We would particularly welcome innovative ideas on how to identify future trends and future business models for the automotve industry, e.g. collecting data from twitter or other digital sources that talk about trends or startups through worldwide VC portfolios, e.g. crunchbase, linkedin, etc.
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!