Dries Faems appointed professor of Innovation and Organization

Prof. D.L.M. Faems will be appointed professor of Innovation & Organization at the Faculty of Economics and Business on 16 April 2011. Faems is an expert in the field of the management of innovation strategies. Innovation is often a complex process because it concerns not only the product, but also the market and the organization itself, and the process is very uncertain. Organizing innovation is therefore a separate discipline.

 

Faems is currently researching exactly how organizations can improve their existing products and at the same time create new ones. Where is the tipping point between gradual and radical innovation? In addition, the new professor will research partnerships between companies that result in a takeover, after they have jointly worked on the development of new technologies. How do those companies organize the transition from partnership to takeover? Finally, Faems conducts a lot of research into the impact of alliances between companies on their independent business performance.

Chair

The chair in Innovation & Organization is a nucleus position with capacity for growth and falls under the responsibility of the Innovation Management and Strategy department, which concentrates on knowledge acquisition and transfer in the field of the strategic management of innovation and entrepreneurship. Faems’s research will fall under FEB’s SOM research school.

Curriculum Vitae

Dries Faems (Belgium, 1977) gained a university degree in Business Engineering, specializing in Human Resource Management (with distinction) from the University of Leuven.He gained a PhD from the same institution in 2006 with a thesis entitled ‘Collaboration for innovation:Processes of governance and learning’. He has been a university lecturer (UD) at the University of Twente since 2007 in Product and Process Innovation and in 2009 he became associate professor. He has been awarded a VENI grant by NWO and various grants from the Flemish FWO (Research Foundation Flanders).