Support, Leadership, and Management of Innovative, Collaborative Work

  Two people sitting at a table analyzing data from documents Copyright: © Martin Braun  

Innovations are the driving force behind the further development of business, science and society, and in some cases they have quite an impact on our working and living environments. However, the production of innovations is a domain that will remain primarily the preserve of people, even in an increasingly automated and digitized world. But how must work be organized and designed so that creative ideas can emerge, and people are willing and able to develop and implement disruptive or evolutionary, technological or organizational product or process innovations? How can companies and their managers best support innovation processes? What might be an appropriate combination of transformational leadership and transactional management? Or are agile self-organization and participative innovation management the keys to success for innovative teams? With our research, we endeavor to contribute to answering these questions and are also very interested in projects with companies and research partners from other disciplines in this wide-ranging research area.