Prof. Dr. Thorsten Posselt

Professional Development

Prof. Dr. Thorsten Posselt is Executive Director of the Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy IMW and Professor of Innovation Management and Innovation Economics at the University of Leipzig. He studied Management and Economics at the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main and at Stanford University, USA. Likewise, at the J. W. Goethe University he habilitated on the subject of “The formation of distribution systems”, having already gained a doctorate there with a thesis on the mobility behavior of companies. From 2000 to 2005, Dr. Thorsten Posselt was Professor of Business, specializing in Services Management, at the University of Leipzig. Following this, he was Professor of Business, with a focus on Retailing, Service Management and E-Commerce, at the University of Wuppertal for six years. In 2008, he returned to Leipzig in order to take on management of the Fraunhofer MOEZ (since 2015, IMW). Dr. Thorsten Posselt had been on several research visits to the University of California in Berkeley and the University of California in Davis in 2003-2007. His academic specializations and fields of interest are the management, economics and politics of innovation, along with services management and economics. He is a member of various institutions, including the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, is on the academic board of trustees of the magazine “Innovationsmanager” (FRANKFURT BUSINESS MEDIA - Der F.A.Z.-Fachverlag), and he was head of the “Marketing” research group of the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft für Betriebswirtschaft e.V. from 2004 to 2014.