PhD projects

Innovation Management (IM) involves all the actions needed to generate innovative ideas and turn them into attractive new products, services, and business models. Today’s business credo mandates more innovations, and those innovations become substantially more complex, multi-dimensional and risky. At RSM we study the latest developments in innovation and we investigate how to manage them successfully in practice by linking the latest management theories to business practice. Our research faculty members study topics such as idea management, innovation strategy, grand societal challenges, social networks, standardization, and diversity.

We are particularly interested in working with PhD students on the following topics:

Leveraging evidence-based learning & development for sustainable innovation: Nurturing a culture of continuous learning and development in organizations ultimately drives sustainable innovation. By leveraging evidence-based learning & development, the organizations ensure that the cultivated skills, knowledge, and behaviors directly contribute to their innovation objectives, creating a holistic approach to managing innovation. By adopting a competency-based learning and development approach, organizations can ensure that their employees acquire the skills and knowledge necessary for sustainable innovation, supported by evidence-based approaches for continuous improvement. This approach has also a positive impact on employee retention. This topic centers around the application of competency-based approaches in learning and development to foster sustainable innovation within organizations. Key areas of exploration could include:

• How can competency-based learning and development programs be designed to support sustainable innovation through evidence-based practices?
• How can organizations identify and define the core competencies required for innovation and align them with their strategic goals?
• What are the best practices for assessing and tracking employees' competency levels and learning needs over time?
• What role does ongoing feedback, (peer)coaching, and mentoring play in nurturing competencies that drive innovation in the long term?
• How can we evaluate the impact of an innovative learning culture within an organization?

Digital transformation in healthcare: Digital technologies are changing the patient journey and healthcare processes. These changes are redefining the behavior and relationship of various stakeholders in healthcare, including patients, healthcare providers, payors, policymakers and regulatory authorities, the healthcare industry, and investors. Therefore, the changes drive the creation of new companies or organizations, forcing existing healthcare-related organizations to develop new strategies and organizational cultures to foster digital innovations. Digital forces are remodeling different strategy domains in the healthcare sector, including customers, competition, data, innovation, and value. In other words, digitalization in healthcare entails not only the development of new digital technologies but also the digital transformation of the healthcare sector, reshaping the business model and processes. This topic mainly aims to deepen our understanding of how the healthcare digital transformation process reshapes the healthcare sector's business model and what factors influence the process, focusing on innovation and value domains.

Personality change and innovation: We live in an age in which people plan, pursue, and experience individual changes that affect career and life trajectories. People improve their educational credentials, change residences, move jobs, switch nationalities, and undergo gender reassignment. All of this is familiar to management researchers. But personality change is only recently emerging in the organisational behavior and management research landscape despite extensive research evidence, practitioner attention and mass-media interest. Management research generally emphasises the stability of personality structures tends to underestimate the possibility that personality can change. I want to build consensus on the relevance of personality change for research in organisational behavior and manager, with a specific focus on innovation. Research questions of interest include: Do people change their personality after a major change in work activities is introduced? How does the use of innovation shape or change psychological variables related to the innovation domain (e.g. openness to experience)? Specifically, we are interested in creating an experimental design in order to assess whether and how personality can change and what are its organisational consequences.