Appointment: Vivianna Fang He

1 August 2022. Prof. Dr. Vivianna Fang He graduated with a Bachelor of Science, Tourism & Hospitality Management from the School of Management at Xiamen University in China in 2006. She then moved to the USA to do her doctorate in management at the George Washington University. She defended her doctoral thesis entitled "Learning from Failure: The Making of Entrepreneurial Leaders", in 2013. Immediately after completing her doctorate, she moved to ETH Zurich where she conducted research and teaching in the area of innovation and entrepreneurship. She obtained her habilitation qualification in the Strategic Management & Innovation Group, Department of Management, Technology & Economics, in 2020. The title of her habilitation thesis is "Collaborative Organising for Entrepreneurship and Innovation". In October 2020, she was appointed Associate Professor at Essec Business School in France.

Research in the field of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The research activities of Prof. Dr. Vivianna Fang He focus on how innovation is understood, the commercialisation of innovative ideas, and how innovation enables the pursuit of a social mission within the context of digital technologies and new forms of organisation. In particular, she has investigated how open source technology provides the foundation for online communities driven by altruism, and how blockchain technology enables decentralised organisation and promotes a more democratic and transparent society. In these projects, she sees liberal technocrats as social entrepreneurs who launch their projects (e.g., DAO, cryptocurrency, open source software/hardware) to promote the ideology of freedom and individual sovereignty. Prof. Dr. Vivianna Fang He uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches in her research, including novel methods such as leveraging AI to analyse video and audio data. 

She has published articles in leading management and academic journals, including Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Information Systems Research, Research Policy, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Nature Review Drug Discovery. Her research work has won several awards and she has already received several research grants and scholarships. Her current research pipeline indicates that a stream of high-quality publications can be expected in the future.

Extensive teaching experience

Prof. Dr. Vivianna Fang He has many years of broad teaching experience in the field of management in Bachelor's, Master's, Doctoral and Executive programmes. She was nominated twice for the ETH Key Innovation in Teaching Award for her teaching at the Master's level at ETH. She pursues an innovative teaching approach based on novel technologies and aims to not only enable students to gain insights from non-traditional means (e.g., simulations games, play, virtual reality cases), but also to get them to critically question established wisdom while considering alternatives. She consciously incorporates her own research on experiential learning into her teaching, thereby enabling students to better internalize lessons learnt and apply them practically.