Oliver Alexy joined the TUM School of Management in July 2012 as a Professor of Strategic Entrepreneurship. Previously, he held several roles in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship Group at Imperial College Business School in London, England. Oliver’s teaching encompasses lectures and seminars on topics such as organizational design, open innovation, entrepreneurial strategy & growth, and social entrepreneurship. He currently teaches on the undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs at TUM School of Management and furthermore offers courses to students of other departments, such as Informatics. He is also a liaison officer (“Vertrauensdozent”) for the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
In his research, Oliver studies how to design organizations that effectively deal with extremely high uncertainty, such as high-tech start-ups, R&D units, or online communities. His recent interests mainly revolve around how collaboration, knowledge disclosure, or framing strategies may help such organizations become more legitimate or more innovative, grow or reestablish themselves, or build or commandeer innovation ecosystems. Oliver’s research has been published or is forthcoming in many of the leading international academic and practitioner-oriented management journals, such as the Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal, as well as Harvard Business Review, California Management Review, Sloan Management Review, and McKinsey Quarterly.
Origins of organizing: In cooperation with INSEAD and the University of Vienna, we enquire how young firms go about designing their fledgling organizations. The insights we develop will help start-ups organize better, and shed new light on the path-dependent processes by which firms are shaped.
Harnessing External Innovations Project (HEIP): Together with partners from Imperial College and the University of Bath, we seek to understand better how firms can successfully innovate together with agents and entities outside the firm. In doing so, we want to improve our understanding of why, when, and how firms can successfully engage in more open and distributed forms of innovation.
