In the wide field of marketing research, innovation is in the focus of our research activities. From a process-based perspective our work covers the early and the later stages of the innovation process. First, our research tackles the fuzzy front end of innovation and aims at making well-grounded recommendations for promising tools of market research. One important challenge here is the early prediction of market success for innovation ideas and concepts. Second, research in the later stages of innovation processes addresses questions of successful market implementation of innovations. We are interested in explaining the process of adoption and diffusion of innovations, and we investigate the implementation of innovations in complex value chains.

Knowledge is critical to the creation of innovations. This is true for individual problem solvers who make use of their knowledge when developing original solutions for new products and services. This is also true on the firm level as knowledge is an important resource to build and to sustain the innovation performance of the whole company. The link between knowledge and innovation constitutes our focus in the field of innovation management research. Our projects emphasize on the role of individual or organizational knowledge as drivers for successful innovation. We are interested in how innovation can be created by the transfer of knowledge across knowledge domains, technology fields or entire industries. Another research project investigates the role of knowledge spillovers between companies that are organized within regional technological clusters.

In traditional market research, users of products and services commonly function as a mere source of information on needs and complaints. By this, manufacturers only exploit a part of the users’ potential, because users can do more! Numerous examples and empirical studies show that users identify problems and opportunities for innovation which are not (yet) addressed by manufacturers. Often enough, they create viable innovations and sometimes even start to sell their innovations to others. User innovations happen in many product and service fields, both in industrial and consumer goods industries (e.g. medical instruments, healthcare, industrial equipment, software, computer hardware, sports gear, banking services). In addition, the increasing diffusion of the internet has prompted users to innovate within organized user networks or members of online user communities.

Research in this field aims at understanding why and through which mechanisms users innovate and which users bear the highest potential for creating substantial innovations. We are also interested in the interaction between innovating users in user communities and innovation platforms. The findings are used to develop practical methods in order to harness user innovativeness for companies. In this respect, work on the phenomenon of user innovation constitutes an important part of open innovation research.

Successful entrepreneurs represent a main driver of economic growth as they (1) regularly convert technological innovations into commercially viable goods; (2) are crucial to employment generation and labor market dynamics; (3) identify promising ways to master the upcoming challenges of shifting demographics, fast-changing technologies, and dynamic economic environments. Thus, some economists have even argued that the entrepreneur is the single most important player in a modern economy.

Our research in this field has a primary focus on explaining the emergence of entrepreneurial intentions and opportunities, behaviors and success at the individual-level and social context by using qualitative and quantitative methods. More specifically, our projects aim at understanding through which cognitive mechanisms personality traits influence intentions towards entrepreneurial behavior. We are also interested in the (hidden) effects of entrepreneurship education in shaping students’ perceptions about entrepreneurship. Moreover, our research addresses the “social construction” of entrepreneurs and the evaluation of innovative start-ups with specific regard to the effects of social interactions and trust building on funding success in business pitches.