CV

Curriculum Vitae: CV (June 2022)

Private website: https://oliverbaumann.github.io/

Working papers: SSRN

Bio

Oliver Baumann is a Professor at the Department of Business & Management and Head of the Strategic Organization Design (SOD) group. His research is at the intersection of organization, strategy, and innovation and has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Advances in Strategic Management, Journal of Management, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal, among others. He is co-editor of the Journal of Organization Design and a member of the Editorial Review Boards of Organization Science and Strategic Management Journal.  

Oliver received a PhD in Business Economics from LMU Munich, an MS in Industrial Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe, and an MS in Engineering Management from Portland State University. Prior to joining the University of Southern Denmark, he was a visiting scholar at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an Assistant Professor at LMU Munich. At the University of Southern Denmark, Oliver is currently a member of the academic council at the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences and affiliated with the Digital Democracy Center, the eScience center, and the Security and Defense network. 

Oliver is fascinated by the notion of organizations as complex adaptive systems and by the power of computational approaches for understanding their dynamics. In particular, he studies how organizations can learn and adapt effectively in the presence of uncertainty and technological change. His research is mainly theoretical, but seeks to build bridges to various application domains such as corporate strategy or new product development. In particular, his current research addresses two broad questions:

1. How does organizational design affect a firm’s ability to deal with complex (interdependent) decision problems?
2. How does organizational design affect a firm’s ability to learn and adapt?

In addressing these questions, Oliver works primarily with computational models, but he has also engaged in in-depth field studies of individual firms as well as conceptual projects. Supported by a grant from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (2017-2022), he is currently migrating several computational models of multi-actor organizations into web-based experimental platforms, using them to conduct laboratory and online experiments.

Education

Ph.D. in Business Economics, LMU Munich, 2004-2008
Master of Business Research, LMU Munich, 2005-2007
M.Sc. in Engineering Management, Portland State University, 2002-2003
M.Sc. in Industrial Engineering, University of Karlsruhe, 1999-2004

Full-time positions

Professor with special responsibilities, SDU, 2017-2022
Associate Professor, SDU, 2011-2017
Assistant Professor, LMU Munich, 2008-2011
Research and Teaching Associate, LMU Munich, 2004-2008

Visiting positions

Max-Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, 2016 (April)
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2010 (fall)
EM Strasbourg Business School / Strasbourg University, 2009-2012
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2007 (spring)

Research areas

Organization design, organizing for innovation, organizational adaptation and learning, behavioral micro-foundations of strategy, computational modeling, experimental methods

Management experience

Member of the steering committee, Digital Democracy Center, SDU, 2021-present
Research group leader, Strategic Organization Design Unit, SDU, 2018-2020, 2021-present
Vice research group leader, Strategic Organization Design Unit, SDU, 2015-2017
Member of the leadership team, Department of Business & Management, SDU, 2015-2020, 2021-present
Budget coordinator, Institute for Information and Organization, LMU Munich, 2005-2010
HR coordinator, Institute for Information and Organization, LMU Munich, 2005-2008