Author: Christoph Hienerth

Christoph Hienerth is Associate Professor at the Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics at Copenhagen Business School and associated researcher at the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He received the Venia Docendi (Habilitation) from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration in 2008.

In general, he is working on the commercialization of innovations and the development of new industries based on user innovations. In particular his research interests are entrepreneurial aspects of very early stages of innovation and new product development, dealing with the recognition and exploitation of opportunities and the role of lead users in these early stages. Christoph Hienerth has performed lead user projects with companies like Grundfos, Coloplast, Siemens, Schindler, German Telekom or Palfinger. He has deepened his knowledge in the field by doing joint research with Eric von Hippel from MIT and Carliss Baldwin from Harvard Business School. He has received the Rudolf Sallinger award for his doctoral thesis and several best paper awards at international conferences and research awards for “top publications” from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He received the WU Wien Best Paper Award in 2007. Christoph Hienerth has also been an academic advisor for various institutions, governmental agencies and ministries in Austria, Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Hungary, Portugal and the Czech Republic with regards to innovation policy, entrepreneurship and innovation- and business plan competitions.

His teaching experience covers a wide area of topics including general business administration, entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship and innovation management. He has designed various courses and held over 50 lectures and seminars. He was awarded with the Copenhagen Business School FUHU Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2009.

Christoph Hienerth has presented his work at over 30 international conferences and various Universities and has been a visiting scholar at George Washington University and MIT Sloan School of Management. He has given various key note speeches on the topic of user innovation and lead user method and is a member of the IBM think-tank “Global Innovation Outlook”. He is reviewer for Long Range Planning, Research Policy, Journal für Betriebswirtschaft, the International Journal of Technology Management, R&D Management and Industry and Innovation.