Appointment: Ann-Kristin Zobel

1 February 2020. Professor Ann-Kristin Zobel was born on 14 April 1987 and is a German citizen.

Ann-Kristin Zobel holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business and a Master of Science in Business Research from Maastricht University in the Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. from the same university in 2013. The title of her dissertation is “Open Innovation: A Dynamic Capabilities Perspective” and was awarded with the annual “Maastricht University Best Dissertation Prize”. During her doctoral studies, she held a visiting researcher position at the University of California Berkeley (USA). Upon completing her Ph.D., she took a postdoctoral position from 2013 to 2015 at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley (USA). In 2015 she joined the Department of Management, Technology and Economics at ETH Zurich as a senior researcher.

Strategic management of collaborative innovation

Ann-Kristin Zobel’s research focuses on how firms strategically manage collaborative and ‘open’ forms of innovation. In particular, she investigates value creation via dynamic capabilities, value capture via intellectual property rights, and performance implications of collaborative innovation. She also studies organizational issues of collaborative innovation, including the organization across firm boundaries, the coordination of meta-organizations, and collaborative behaviour within these meta-organizations. In these fields, she has published numerous articles in leading academic journals (e.g. Journal of Management Studies, Academy of Management Perspectives, Journal of Product Innovation Management). In her current work, she focuses on the energy sector as an ideal setting for empirically investigating collaborative strategies in a technologically complex and turbulent environment. In an ongoing joint research project with the Stanford Graduate School of Business, she researches the coordination of and behaviour within a meta-organization consisting of multiple international energy utilities and cleantech start-ups. In a recently acquired project from the National Research Program “Digital Transformation” (NFP 77), she extends her analysis of collaborative strategies to the digital transformation of energy and mobility solutions in the context of smart cities.

Practice-oriented research: Energy, innovation & management

Ann-Kristin Zobel is a member of the organizing committee of the “World Open Innovation Conference” - a leading innovation conference that combines academic and industry perspectives. At ETH Zurich she initiated an externally funded project on “Free Electrons”, a consortium of ten international energy utilities and works closely with these industry partners to transfer her scientific findings into practice. She also served as a member of the board and head of the work package “Energy, Innovation & Management” of the SCCER-CREST (Competence Center for Research in Energy, Society and Transition), which works in close cooperation with industry partners and develops strategic and political recommendations for the energy transition in Switzerland.

Ann-Kristin Zobel has experience as a lecturer in several business schools. She has taught management courses at both bachelor and master’s degree level and has competences in “problem-based learning”, a student-centred teaching approach based on small groups and cases. At ETH Zurich, she lectured on topics within the fields of entrepreneurship, management and sustainability. She has continually supervised bachelor’s and master’s theses on the topics of innovation, technology management, and strategic management.