Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
Diversity is crucial to innovation. Therefore, there must be more diversity entrepreneurs and venture capitalists that support them explicitly. Y Combinator, one of the most successful and famous accelerators, added directories specific for black, latinx, and women founders. VCs like BLCK.VC specifically target black founders. However, entrepreneurship and venture capital markets are private and thus less is known about the stakeholders, players, and people that make up the innovation, entrepreneurial and venture capital ecosystem. Making this tacit knowledge visible and thus analyzable is one goal of this work. Help us identify Germany's (Europe's, The World's) diversity shapers and leaders, how they connect, where they come from, and where they are going.
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused 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 are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Review literature on diversity, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and innovation, innovation in VC investements and angel investments
- Research and identification of the relevant stakeholders (people as well as institutions) of the German (European/Worlds) innovation system by category, e.g. entrepreneurs, serial entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, business angel networks, family offices, universities, entrepreneurial programs, incubators, journalists, platforms etc. (e.g., crunchbase, LinkedIn, dealroom, VC portfolios, initiatives) that drive diversity
- Database building of relevant stakeholder (names, focus areas, links, investments, background, etc)
- Visualization of distribution and networks of relevant stakeholders
- Interviews with VCs, founders, and opinion leaders
- Elaboration of possible, novel ways of dynamic visualization of these ecosystems.
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for innovation/ diversity / technology / entrepreneurship / VC
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
- Good with visualizing insights and data
📚 Further Reading
Karlsson, C., Rickardsson, J. & Wincent, J. Diversity, innovation and entrepreneurship: where are we and where should we go in future studies?. Small Bus Econ (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-019-00267-1
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of a 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 the most original insights/tweets/graphs/sources of your topic and 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. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!