Biography

My research during the Max Weber Fellowship has focused on the impact of demographic aging on innovation (“Innovation and Aging”). Aging populations are among the most striking societal developments in Europe. However, how aging relates to industries’ and companies’ capacity to innovate is still poorly understood. My research has developed a framework to fill this gap and investigate how perceptions of broader societal developments are institutionalized in innovation processes on different levels (communities, networks, innovation systems). In addition to that, I have finished two papers on the dynamics of Innovation and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that have by now been published in Research Policy and Technological Forecasting & Social Change, respectively.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of Innovation Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Before joining the EUI, I have worked as a Ph.D. researcher and then post-doc at the Centre for Technology and Society of Berlin University, where I have been, among other, the scientific coordinator of an interdisciplinary research consortium (funded by the German Research Foundation DFG) and the principal investigator of an EU funded project about academic entrepreneurship. I obtained my Ph.D. from Berlin University of Technology in Sociology and Business Administration in 2005 and have been educated as an Industrial Engineer at Cottbus University of Technology (Germany), Indiana University (USA) and Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) from where I hold a MSc.