Karin Hoisl has been awarded with the prestigious MOMENTUM research grant of the Volkswagen Foundation. Throughout the next five years, she will receive a total funding of €630,000 for her research program “Organization Design for Digital Transformation.” The holder of the Chair of Organization and Innovation at the Business School of the University of Mannheim intends to use her research project to understand how companies become digital and to develop a general theory on this topic.
The results are highly relevant to business practice because digital transformation makes companies competitive in quickly adapting to changes and making full use of large amounts of data – big data – and assists in their future existence. Even though companies have now understood the predictive power of big data, most of them have not transformed into data-driven organizations. They are facing great challenges, because while the use of Big Data enables innovative business models, it also changes internal structures and hierarchies, demands new resources and changes the corporate culture.
Prof. Hoisl's main research interests are knowledge management, organizational innovation, women in STEM, and labor mobility. Her research has been published in numerous scientific journals such as Management Science, Organization Science, the Strategic Management Journal, and Research Policy.
The MOMENTUM program, which forms part of the Volkswagen Foundation's “Momentum – Support for First Professionals” initiative launched in 2017, is a 5-year research fellowship, aimed at recently appointed professors. Its goal is to provide opportunities to advance the content and strategic development of the professorship and to strengthen diversity of research and creativity of university researchers in Germany. The initiative, funded by the independent, non-profit Volkswagen Foundation, supports approximately eight recently tenured professors from all fields at German universities annually.