Henry Sauermann

Henry Sauermann is an associate professor of strategy (with tenure), who joined ESMT Berlin in May 2017. He is the first holder of the POK Pühringer PS Chair in Entrepreneurship. Previously he was an associate professor of strategy and innovation and the PhD Coordinator at the Scheller College of Business at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Henry explores the role of human capital in science, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Among others, he studies how scientists’ motives and incentives relate to important outcomes such as innovative performance in firms, patenting in academia, or career choices and entrepreneurial interests. This stream of research also explores important differences in these mechanisms across organizational contexts such as industrial versus academic science or startups versus large established firms.

In new projects, Henry studies the dynamics of motives and incentives over time, and explores non-traditional innovative institutions such as Crowd Science and Innovation Contests. Additional work is underway to gain deeper insights into scientific labor markets and to derive implications for junior scientists, firms, and policy makers.

He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, a Sloan Foundation Research Program, as well as the Georgia Research Alliance. He has published in a wide range of journals including Management Science, Organization Science, Research Policy, Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and PLoS ONE. He has presented his work at many national and international conferences and was invited to share his research with policy makers and business executives at meetings of The National Academies and The Conference Board.

Education

• PhD (Duke University)
• Dipl.-Vw., Economics (University of Potsdam)

Research

Science and Innovation; Entrepreneurial Strategy; Human Capital

Teaching

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Technology Strategy

Expertise

Languages

German, English