Third Party Funding

The research project “ESG-Driven Innovation” examines how strategic alignment with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals shapes companies' innovation processes, competitiveness, and long-term value creation. Driven by societal expectations, regulatory requirements, and emerging market opportunities, an increasing number of firms are integrating ESG criteria into their corporate strategies.

ESG encompasses environmental aspects (e.g., CO₂ reduction), social factors (e.g., labor standards, diversity), and issues of good corporate governance (e.g., transparency, compliance). This holistic perspective is gaining importance as a strategic framework for companies, investors, and policymakers alike.

The project focuses on analyzing how ESG-oriented corporate strategies influence innovation decisions, are reflected in patent portfolios, and shape business model innovation. The study explores the mechanisms and contextual factors that enable ESG goals to serve as drivers of new technologies and products — or to redirect existing innovation paths. In doing so, it seeks to generate a deeper understanding of the interrelations between sustainability orientation, innovation dynamics, and firm competitiveness.

The overarching aim is to demonstrate how ESG-oriented innovation activities — such as in product development or technology management — foster the advancement of business models and innovation strategies, thereby supporting the transition toward a sustainable economy.

Founded by: Dennemeyer & Co. Sarl
Duration: 2025 - 2028

In the InnoManager project, a consortium consisting of INNOMAN GmbH, TecArt GmbH and the Chair of Economic and Social Statistics is developing an AI-based platform designed to help companies systematically advance and better evaluate innovation ideas. The aim is to turn initial project ideas into viable concepts more quickly and to ease the burden of key innovation-related decisions for companies - especially small and medium - sized enterprises. The Chair of Economic and Social Statistics contributes its expertise in artificial intelligence, data analysis, and the scientific evaluation of complex systems. Together with the project partners, the goal is to create a solution that brings together different sources of information, identifies opportunities and risks, and at the same time places great emphasis on data protection and confidentiality. The outcome will be a practical prototype intended to make innovation processes more understandable, more structured, and more efficient.

Duration: 2026-2027

The objective of the research project is to systematically capture and analyze the current state of AI-related competencies in German companies. To this end, a differentiation is made between various AI technologies and application areas in order to create a detailed picture of the spatial distribution of these competencies. As part of the project, publicly accessible texts from company websites will be analyzed, as they allow for a differentiated depiction of AI usage at the firm level. By examining different technologies and application areas, it is also possible to draw conclusions about potential differences between urban and rural regions. At the same time, the data basis allows for an analysis of the temporal development of AI usage over a period of at least five years. Based on these analyses, the following research questions are addressed:

• How are firm-level AI competencies spatially distributed across Germany?
• How have companies’ AI competencies evolved over time?

From a technical perspective, the project will use the “Common Crawl” database , which archives website texts. Based on the texts from company websites, firms’ AI competencies will be identified using keywords and their contextual embedding. An additional benefit of this project is the generation of a systematic dataset of company website texts that can be used for further analyses, independent of the AI-related focus.

The German Research Foundation funds the subproject (C05) as part of the CRC-TRR 294 "Structural Change of Property". (Mike Geppert, together with Tilman Reitz, Institute of Sociology)

"Academic capitalism" has been discussed for a good 25 years. Nevertheless, universities in many countries have remained public, state-subsidized (or philanthropic) subsidized institutions. However, strategic realignments have also occurred at public and non-profit universities, which are changing the ownership structure. For example, autonomy in managing university resources has been increased in many places. In many higher education systems, assets and personnel budgets are increasingly managed according to private-sector patterns, income from tuition fees and the exploitation of research results are increased, and state funds are increasingly allocated on a competitive basis. This raises the question of who owns the institutions and the academically produced knowledge. At the same time, it remains to be clarified whether different forms of academic ownership play functionally equivalent roles – if, for example, in some countries, state sponsorship of universities dominates, while in others, they are mainly financed by tuition fees, some of which are subsidized by the state. Thus, it remains open whether different national strategies will develop into divergent capitalist knowledge orders. Our subproject will investigate these questions through data analysis, reconstructions of institutional change, and case studies in three institutionally heterogeneous higher education systems: the essentially publicly funded and designed system of Germany, the operationally heavily privatized but still publicly (cross-)financed higher education system of the United Kingdom, and the Brazilian system, in which higher education institutions are predominantly privately operated and to in large parts profit-oriented managed.

By combining economic and sociological expertise, we plan to conduct a comparative study of the institutional transformation of 'academic capitalism' beyond mere discourses and instruments. In the subproject, previous research on intellectual property (Reitz) and ownership of public interest organizations (Geppert) will be continued in order to generate essential theoretical insights on the structural change of property beyond the subject area of higher education.

A central point here is that the goods in which universities specialize differ from typical goods of industrial capitalism. Knowledge is a public good in several senses. It is (initially) a non-scarce commodity because it is not used up when used and is difficult to keep exclusive. In many places, teaching, even if it cannot be reproduced free of charge, is also considered primarily being a public task. On the contrary, this part of academic work can hardly be rationalized because it is irreducibly time-consuming. Attempts of automation lead to a loss of quality and performance. A leading assumption of the project is that, on the one hand, these specifics raise many of the cost problems to which academic ownership change responds, from New Public Management to opening to private investments. On the other hand, there are clear limits to implementation: only limited profit can be made with non-scarce goods and services that can hardly be rationalized. In the project, we will focus less on the new rules and media of intra-academic competitions, such as publication metrics, project funding, target agreements, assessments, and rankings, as these have already been well-researched. Instead, we are interested in the actual socio-economic conditions and effects of academic property relations.

Based on selected universities in the example countries, our sub-project will examine three dimensions of this puzzle:

1. Who owns the university, and what belongs to the university?
2. Who owns academic research?
3. When, how, and with what consequences do apprenticeships and qualifications become commodities?

Question 1 is mainly concerned with the extent to which there is a clear trend towards more private university property and where its causes and limits may lie. Question 2 makes it possible to analyze the complex relationship between the profit strategies of universities and researchers and industrial political-based research funding strategies. With question 3, we shed light on the conditions under which the offer of expensive courses of study, where completion, in turn, promises economic advantages, prevails as a business model and what the socio-structural consequences are.

Duration: 2025-2028

Funded by: Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS)

Digital pension information on future pension entitlements offers great potential for pension planning. Against the backdrop of major demographic changes, forward-looking and evidence-based planning is important for both individuals and political decision-makers. The central aim of the project is to provide empirical evidence on how the provision of digital pension information via the pension dashboard of the German Pension Insurance (digitale Rentenübersicht, digiRÜ) affects pension planning.

To this end, people in Germany are incentivised to use the digiRÜ in an extensive, multi-stage online survey. As part of a randomised experiment, participants in the surveys are divided into groups that should or should not use the digiRÜ. By comparing the groups, the causal effect of the digiRÜ on retirement planning behaviour can be determined. The repeated survey makes short and medium-term behavioural effects measurable.

The project aims to answer the following research questions:

(1) How does the digiRÜ change expectations about future retirement income and the retirement planning of individuals? Are pension gaps recognised? (How) are they closed?

(2) What potential do the digiRÜ data (in aggregated form) offer for the monitoring of old-age provision by welfare state actors?

(3) Which group differences and vulnerable groups can be identified? What potential does digiRÜ offer for their support?

Together with Prof. Dr Tabea Bucher-Koenen, University of Mannheim and Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Prof. Dr Holger Stichnoth, University of Strasbourg and ZEW, Dr Mathias Dolls, ifo Institute Munich.

Duration: 2025-2027

Funded by: Research Network on Old Age Security (Forschungsnetzwerk Alterssicherung FNA)

The project analyses from the perspective of employers and employees which factors influence whether employees close to retirement continue to work or retire (early). We consider monetary and non-monetary incentives as well as individual circumstances. The comparison of the employer and employee sides provides important insights into how the effective retirement age can be increased.

The ageing of society, and in particular the imminent retirement of the baby boomer generation, poses a major challenge. In addition to the increasing labour shortage, this development has a major impact on the financial stability of the pay-as-you-go statutory pension scheme. It is therefore important to identify short to medium-term options for action. A key factor is the age at which employees are no longer available to the labour market. Many employees leave the labour market before reaching the statutory retirement age by taking advantage of partial retirement, severance schemes or the deduction-free pension for very long-term insured persons.

Later retirement, especially for baby boomers, could lead to some short-term relief for the statutory pension scheme. This proposal centres on the question of how the effective retirement age can be increased. We look at this question from the employee and employer perspective. The existing literature shows that workplace characteristics, institutional framework conditions and individual factors are important. With the help of interviews and surveys with experiments among (near-retirement) employees and employers, we will investigate which factors are central to staying in the labour force longer, taking into account trade-offs on the employee and employer side. In addition, willingness to pay for key job characteristics will be determined and how this is influenced by the institutional framework (e.g. additional pension points). By considering the employer and employee side, factors can be determined that are desired by employees and appear possible from the employer's perspective. Focussing on these factors is a promising strategy to counteract the demographically induced decline in the short and medium term.

Together with Prof. Dr. Sarah Necker, ifo Institute and Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nuremberg

Duration: 2024-2027

Funded by DFG

The aim of the project is to analyse the effects of multiple competition in the higher education system against the background of its increasing internationalization. To this end, changes in job advertisements for professorships are to be examined. The filling of professorships plays a decisive role in the strategic positioning of universities in multiple competition. It can be assumed that the requirements of the various competitions in which universities find themselves are reflected in job advertisements for professorships. 

Empirically, the research project focuses on the analysis of job advertisements for professorships in different disciplines at German universities between 1990 and 2020. Based on a detailed content analysis of these job advertisements, the research project aims to show how different competitions in the higher education system and in particular the increasing internationality of these competitions are reflected in job advertisements over time. Furthermore, the project aims to explain the alignment that occurs in the job advertisements of different disciplines and types of higher education institutions as well as the observable variation with the help of various contextual factors. Both qualitative and quantitative methods will be used. Theoretically, the project is based on institutionalist theories, in particular on arguments from neo-institutionalism (with particular reference to world society theory and the glocalization perspective), as well as imprinting theory. As a result, contributions to research on multiple competitions in the higher education system, on the strategic positioning of universities and on institutionalist organizational theories are expected.

Project leader: Prof. Dr. Peter Walgenbach
Project member: Lisa-Maria Gerhardt