Business Management, in Particular Digital Transformation
Under the umbrella of digital transformation, Thomas researches novel forms of organizing, crowdsourcing, various types of openness (open strategy, open innovation, and open government) and (cultural) entrepreneurship in a digital economy.
The professorship pursues various research projects under the umbrella of digital transformation. More specifically, I pursue two research streams: (1) digital transformation and new organizational forms, and (2) the consequences and grand challenges of digital transformation.
Digital transformation and new organizational forms
The digital transformation stream of my research broadly interrogates how organizing changes in the digital age. Within this stream, I first inquire into digitally-enabled new forms of organizing. This line of research seeks to understand how new forms of organizing, such as platforms, operate. The second theme in this research is probing into what digitalization means for institutional theory. The third theme explores how digitalization affects strategy-making and entrepreneurship.
Consequences of digital transformation
In this research stream, I investigate the (societal) consequences and implications of digital transformation and organizing phenomena against the backdrop of grand challenges and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One line of my research in this stream centers on understanding how to create better working conditions on digital platforms and making platforms more sustainable. My second line of research builds on my earlier work on open government and social innovation. This research line asks how (digitally-enabled) open, participative social innovation approaches are instrumental in addressing grand challenges. The empirical context for this research is the #WirVsVirus Hackathon and the follow-up implementation program.
The students are at the center of my teaching and supervision activities. I support and challenge my students and provide opportunities for them to pursue their interests. As a research-driven teacher, I endeavor to make complex phenomena understandable to students and distill practical insights. Consequently, my teaching embraces the following principles:
• Ensuring that students read
• Creating an engaging, interactive classroom environment
• Providing feedback and enabling trial-and-error learning
• Combining teaching, practice, and research
• Developing and participating in innovative teaching formats
I teach courses in organization theory, strategy, entrepreneurship, as well as innovation and technology management, which often focus on various digital transformation phenomena.