We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Sebastian Starke is one of nine young scientists to have won the sponsorship award from the Südwestmetall employers' association! Sebastian Starke received the award for his dissertation at the Chair of Marketing & Innovation at the University of Mannheim on the topic of “Essays in Marketing and Innovation: Empirical Investigations of Customer Ratings and Project Review Decisions”.

As one of his projects of his doctoral thesis, Dr. Starke examines the ratings that customers receive from companies. Ratings are a central building block for business management. Ensuring the objectivity of these ratings is therefore essential. However, although business management research has been dealing with this topic for a long time, new developments in market conditions and technologies continuously raise further questions. Especially in the context of marketing and innovation research, there is still a great need for research on the objectivity of evaluations from the perspective of customers and managers. The award-winning dissertation addresses these research gaps and provides numerous new insights.

For more than 30 years, Südwestmetall has used the award to honor outstanding achievements by young academics at Baden-Württemberg's nine state universities. A Südwestmetall sponsorship award worth 5,000 euros is offered at each university. The prizes are awarded annually on the recommendation of the universities for scientific work that is relevant to the industrial working world or its sociopolitical framework. “This long tradition shows how important it is to our association to sustainably promote young scientists in Baden-Württemberg,” said Südwestmetall Chairman Dr. Joachim Schulz at the award ceremony in Stuttgart, which was attended by Baden-Württemberg's Science Minister Petra Olschowski.