📌 Key facts
- When: Start anytime. Applications are open!
- How to apply: Send us an e-mail (at the end of this page) with your CV and a grade report.
- 📌 Key facts
- 💡 Background
- 🦾Who We Are
- 🎯 Goals
- 🎓 Profile
- ➕ Additional Information
- 📄 Requirements to any Work
- 📝 How to Apply
- 📬 Contact
💡 Background
Universities and research institutions increasingly promote technology transfer and spin‑offs as a way to bring scientific discoveries into practice and create societal and economic impact. At the same time, only a small share of scientists actually found startups, even though many work with highly innovative ideas, data, and technologies. Existing research on academic entrepreneurship has identified some structural and individual drivers of spin‑offs, but we still know little about how scientists themselves experience barriers to founding and how different academic career stages (PhD candidates, postdocs, professors) shape their entrepreneurial decisions. This project addresses that gap by systematically studying both perceived barriers and the profiles of those researchers who do become founders.
🦾Who We Are
As part of my PhD, I study the barriers to academic entrepreneurship as well as the characteristics of PhD candidates, postdocs, and professors who found startups.
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on 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 Organisations 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 are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies, and organisations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
Current research themes include, but are not limited to:
- Barriers to academic entrepreneurship (qualitative / mixed-methods)
- Conduct interviews with scientists (e.g., PhD candidates, postdocs, professors) about their experiences with startup intentions or attempts
- Identify and structure barriers (individual, organizational, institutional, systemic)
- Analyze how scientists perceive the tension between research, academic careers, and founding a startup
- Optional: Develop a conceptual framework of barriers to academic entrepreneurship
- Who becomes an academic founder? (quantitative)
- Quantitative analysis of an existing dataset on academic founding
- Analyze: Who founds? (PhD candidates vs. postdocs vs. professors)
- Examine founder characteristics (e.g., discipline, career trajectory, publication record, international experience – depending on data availability)
- Optional: Additional survey on founding intentions and perceived barriers
🎓 Profile
You are a good fit if you:
- Are interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, and/or higher education and research systems
- Enjoy empirical research (interviews, data analysis, literature work)
- Work independently and in a structured way
- For quantitative topics: Have first experience with statistics software (e.g., R or SPSS)
- For qualitative topics: Are interested in conducting interviews and qualitative analysis
Prior knowledge of entrepreneurship research is welcome but not required. Curiosity and willingness to engage deeply with the topic are most important.
➕ Additional Information
- Access to an existing dataset on academic founders
- Opportunity to conduct your own interviews with scientists
- In some cases, multiple students may jointly developing/validating the same dataset. Collaboration will be encouraged where feasible.
📄 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 - summarise your research and possibly present it
Please note that these deliverables are not officially required.
📝 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Luisa Lühdorff via email (Subject: Application Academic Entrepreneurship Thesis - [Name]) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea(interest in the email, as well as your start date.
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!
📬 Contact
Luisa Lühdorff (Chair for Strategy and Organization)