ZEPPELIN Chair of Innovation Management & Transformation

The ZEPPELIN Chair of Innovation Management & Transformation deals with questions whose answers contribute to both theory and practice to derive implications for researchers, managers, and policy makers. We take a behavioral perspective on the study of Innovation Management and Transformation, with the overarching goal to explain how organizational actors can successfully and sustainably innovate despite challenging conditions.

In our current research portfolio, this includes the topic areas of creativity and innovation in teams and projects, changing workplaces due to new digital technologies, consequences of adverse conditions (like crises, stress, setbacks, or resource constraints) especially for innovators and entrepreneurs, as well as sustainable innovation and entrepreneurship.

Moreover, in our teaching, research, and transfer activities, the ZEPPELIN Chair of Innovation Management & Transformation focuses on the challenges of implementing digital technologies in the innovation process as well as the consequences of increasing implementation of digital technologies at (innovators') workplaces. The combination of these topics has currently gained particular importance to derive evidence-based recommendations on how organizations and actors within them can respond to crises like the war in Ukraine and the corona-pandemic in order to maintain their capability to innovate in such times of crisis and how to leverage the opportunities provided by new digital technologies like AI.

The chair's teaching strategy and philosophy rests on three basic principles:

• the connection between research and teaching
• the connection between practice and teaching
• the focus on evidence-based content

In our courses, we aim to introduce students into scientific thinking and to stimulate their excitement for research. In line with this aim, we actively integrate students in our research projects through research projects and the work on their theses. In this regard, supporting and demanding students' critical thinking is generally a matter of personal importance to us. We are convinced that students should not take taught contents as granted. Rather, they should learn to constructively challenge these contents. When successful, this results in a double dividend; students' learning success benefits from achieving a higher level of involvement with the contents taught, while our own research activities benefit from being directed to potential inconsistencies within theories and to potentially remaining research gaps.

Moreover, our courses also connect to practice in several ways like guest lectures or working on real business challenges provided by companies. This facilitates the understanding how research results can translate into managerial relevance and practice. This is even more important, given that throughout their management studies, students frequently come across "insights" and "formulae of success" that are insufficiently backed by theory and empirical evidence, for example in popular media, internet sources, or in the context of internships. Because of that, it is of particular importance that the contents taught in our courses are based on solid theoretical foundations and have been confirmed by rigorous empirical research and that students learn to critically evaluate published study results and best-practice recommendations.