Radboud University
FINDER, a competitive Marie Curie Research and Training Program funded by the European Committee stands for: Fostering Innovation Networks in a Digital Era.
The FINDER program sets out to Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era. Appointed Marie Curie FINDER PhD Fellows investigate the innovative collaborative arrangement among organizations as they inclusively explore digital technology for new product or market development.
The FINDER research scope spans industries and job functions, requiring candidates to synthesize complex information and to approach problems nimbly in a manner that can be transferred to both academics and practitioners.
FINDER demands a sophisticated understanding of the context in which business is done, the effect of technology in driving these collaborative processes and of the stakeholders involved. FINDER’s integrated curriculum prepares students to drive change at the vanguard of business and technology by challenging them to consider multiple perspectives and to create innovative solutions to problems but in such a way that they are not only profitable to business but also relevant and responsible towards society at large.
The research and training program is driven by a collaboration of Radboud University and Atos, teaming up in this trajectory over a period of four years.
FINDER operates through 5 dedicated research themes, all pivoting around the same theme: Innovative Fintech collaborations.
FINDER accommodates five high caliber and fulltime PhD positions, facilitating first class PhD- training, as well as first class in-company training at the crossroads of Fintech academia and business.
The FINDER program sets out to Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era (FINDER). A team of affiliated Marie Curie FINDER PhD Fellows investigate the innovative collaborative arrangement amongst organizations – grassroots, incumbents and the wider society – as they inclusively explore digital technology for new product or market development. Unique features of this European Industrial Doctorate are:
These 5 pieces line out the future of Fintech collaboration in a complex stakeholder field.
The 5 projects include:
The advancement of digital technologies has created new opportunities for identifying, absorbing and utilising original knowledge that, in turn, enables innovation. The exponential growth in the volume and pace of available knowledge requires new approaches and practices for the management of innovation. These practices include collaborative and open processes and routines for the generation of new idea, for filtering and selecting ideas and finally for implementing the selected ideas. Moreover, appropriate organisational structures and governance mechanisms need to be in place to support this process, able to deal with a multitude of stakeholders, as found in digital technology-driven fields for innovation, such as Europe’s reorienting financial services sector. Close attention is paid to managerial practices, which revolve around including people at different levels of organisations, as well as people outside organisations, in strategy and innovation processes. The following research question guides this project:
Central RQ: How do digital technologies influence systems, practices and processes for the effective management of innovation within and across organisations?
Many established firms have failed to adapt effectively to the disruptive forces in the environment. Recent examples of this phenomenon include Blockbuster, Eastman Kodak, HMV, Lehman Brothers and Nokia. Such failures tend to be particularly prevalent when the nature of external change is discontinuous, similar to what the digital transformation has involved. The digital transformation requires firms to reconfigure their existing ways of working, having to rethink their assumptions about how to succeed in their chosen industry. Europe’s financial services are an example of such industries, shaken up by the recent advancements in digital technology. Incumbents need to adjust their processes and to organise in ways that allow for sensing and seizing external emerging opportunities. The adaptation processes require bottom-up, horizontal and top-down flows of knowledge-sharing, decision-making and resource allocation processes. The open research question to be answered is:
What firm level and individual level factors give rise to organisations’ adaptability in response to disruptive forces? How?
In good times and bad, firms regularly reshape themselves. Firms may re-align organisation structure with strategy and changed external circumstances (Puranam & Gulati 2009), intervene to stimulate specific activities (Okhuysen and Eisenhardt 2002; Aalbers, 2019), or downsize during challenging times (Dougherty & Bowman 1995). Even under such challenging circumstances, entrepreneurship continues to take place. Intra-entrepreneurs often have to build organisations in order to perform activities for which markets are not yet ready, or even are the first to render solutions to navigate out of crisis. Accordingly, entrepreneurs and managers must consider the design of business models and even building businesses to execute transactions which cannot yet be performed in the market. While reshaping firms (e.g. changing structure or size) is both important and frequent, it is also relatively understudied. Moreover, extant research (e.g. on downsizing and turnaround) typically focuses on traditional outcomes (e.g. profits) with less emphasis on such things as collaboration, knowledge creation and innovation at the individual or team levels. The study of business models at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship research involves an exploration of how firms do business at the system-level under such challenging conditions. These are conditions typically to be expected, also in the wake of COVID-19, with economic prospects scaling down substantially across various industries. Such interdisciplinary investigations are essential for understanding how firms may re-align organisation structure with strategy under suddenly changing external circumstances, with the implications of digital transformation potentially helping different emergent ecosystem actors to outperform in this new landscape. Europe’s financial services industry presents an example of this type of dynamics, facing both technology-driven as well as institutionally-driven challenges in re-inventing and exploring alternative business models as well as entering into economically uncertain times as economic crisis looms on the horizon.
This quantitatively oriented research project investigates the following research questions: What are the characteristics of alternative business models in digital ecosystems? Which factors facilitate their development as firms reshape themselves in the face of sudden crisis? This project brings together research on antecedents, processes and consequences associated with organisational reshaping and consider the role of technology as enabler or constraint in this process. The project outline allows for the combination of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches targeting single or multiple organisational levels. The project has good access to the European financial services industry and the fintech community in particular as inroads to original data collection and industry exposure, as well as access to the major academic business data repositories (Icon, Crunchbase, Lexus Nexus, etc.). To reiterate, this project investigates the following research questions:
What are the characteristics of alternative business models in digital ecosystems? Which factors facilitate their development?
It is essential to look into the dynamics of entrepreneurship networks within the digital ecosystem. In particular, the way that networks of entrepreneurship can be fostered by system-level factors is explored, as well as the way that activities and initiatives are driven by large organisations. When it comes to digital transformation, limited effort has been devoted to researching the internal organisation of entrepreneurial ventures and the constitutive elements of the internal organisation in firms. There is an interesting variety among technology start-ups and significant deviancies from the standard evolutionary path which indicates opportunities for founders to make key choices with consequences for a venture’s future success. Different modes of collaborative entrepreneurship may drive different learning routines across the ecosystem, that are important to understand before it becomes viable to scale-up successful business models to other domains. To create guidelines for entrepreneurs and for effective new business creation in the digital era, FINDER focuses on questions such as:
What are the internal and external contingencies that explain the diverse organisational arrangements seen in new ventures? How does the internal organisation of entrepreneurial ventures interact with governance, ownership, industry and geography?
This project looks into the societal impact of digital transformation and the way that sustainable strategies by organisations can benefit a society during and after a digital transformation. Organisations individually and collectively play critical roles in sustainability aspects of the digital transformation, as they develop new products, processes and technologies, establishing common industry standards and negotiating for regulatory support. Next to institutional forces effectuating social payoff, strategic action by organisations may also instill (unforeseen) social payoff to society as resources get reallocated elsewhere and as employees get reemployed, potentially infusing external innovation. Because of the magnitude of the challenges and the complexity that comes with such paradoxical forces, the digital transformation needs to be investigated from a sustainability perspective. FINDER intends to answer questions such as:
What are the roles, challenges and opportunities for incumbent firms and newcomers for a sustainable transition to digital technologies? How can organisations overcome struggles over the meaning of sustainability, within and across organisational fields, as the digital ecosystem unfolds?
The FINDER research team joins forces across a number of leading academic institutions in the EU as well as business life.
With Atos and Radboud University as principal partners driving this collaboration, an innovative and thriving research environment is created to fuel future cutting edge research into the collaborative fintech domain.
Radboud University – Institute for Management Research is internationally renowned for the quality of its research, teaching and facilities. Radboud is one of the largest Dutch universities acclaimed for the quality of teaching and research. This public university, established on October 17th, 1923 is situated in Nijmegen, the oldest city of The Netherlands and has a strong focus on research.
Radboud University has seven faculties and enrolls over 19,899 students. It was internationally ranked 156th by the QS World University Rankings and takes on a prominent position in Europe. The university is currently successfully coordinating 114 European Commission Research projects and 41 H2020 projects of which 10 projects are MC ITN projects. The Radboud University Institute for Management Research (IMR) is recognized for interdisciplinary research and has recently been ranked 9th in The Netherlands for quality of research (REF 2016). The IMR is a key research institute at Radboud University. Radboud has in total 143 assistant, associate and full professors and as of 2015, 63 PhD candidates are pursuing doctoral degrees in this university.
The university aims to produce and disseminate research of world-class quality by employing international partnerships that increase knowledge, skills, understanding and impact. Radboud University has invested heavily to enhance the quality of doctoral training. Teaching quality takes a central stage at Radboud, with the latest National teaching leagues ranking the Business School’s teaching as runner up in The Netherlands, above Rotterdam and Amsterdam, only topped by Groningen.
Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 120,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of € 13 billion. European number one in Cloud, Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing, the Group provides end-to-end Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, Business Applications and Digital Workplace solutions through its Digital Transformation Factory, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across all business sectors. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Syntel, Unify and Worldline. Atos is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.
For further information please visit: www.atos.net/fintech
The core project team comprises of the 4 PhDs together with a wider team of academics and industry professionals.
Dr Rick Aalbers is a Full Professor of Strategy at the department of Business Administration of the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has been a visiting scholar at Imperial College London, National University of Ireland at Galway and The Tokyo Institute of Technology. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a Manager at Deloitte Consulting where he advised on strategic change in the financial services industry. A native of The Netherlands, he holds a Masters degree in Business Administration from Rotterdam School of Management, a second Masters degree in Business Economics (cum laude) from Erasmus University’s School of Economics and a PhD in Business and Economics from Groningen University. His work has been accepted for publication by leading international journals, including Research Policy, Long Range Planning, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Product Innovation Management, MIT Sloan Management Review, Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, Journal of Business Strategy, Management Decision, Innovation, Ivey Business Journal and British Journal of Management, among others. A monograph on Innovation networks appeared with Routledge.
Remco Neuteboom is the Senior Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, Global Financial Services at Atos. Alongside his team of industry directors, Remco works on major digital transformation projects in Financial Services. Remco’s particular areas of focus include Customer Experience, Operational Transformation, Trust & Compliance and Business Reinvention — ranging from developing new data-driven business models through to Cloud strategy. He is also responsible for the Atos Group FinTech strategy and go-to-market approach to working with innovative start-up companies, including the Atos Global Fintech Program.
Ivo Luijendijk – Atos Group Industry Director Data Analytics and Emerging Technologies – Global Financial Services and member of the Scientific Community. Ivo is a business technologist with over 20 years of experience in bringing technology driven innovation into the business of his clients. His natural drive to understand and demystify complex topics is a constant in his career, where he helped clients make the changes they needed with the help of technological innovations as they emerge. After 15 years’ experience as a banking consulting, Ivo now drives business reinvention for the Atos global financial services clients.
Dr Saeed Khanagha is an Associate Professor of Strategy at VU University, Amsterdam. He is a former ITN ESR, and has received his PhD from Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has been collaborating in a number of research projects with several multi-national companies, including Ericsson, Intel and Phillips. His research is focused on organisational capabilities for managing emerging technologies and new business models for the digital age. His research has been published in outlets such as Journal of Management Studies, Long Range Planning and R&D Management. He currently serves as organizer and guest editor of a Long Range Planning special issue entitled Strategizing in a digital era. He has co-organized several events, including two extensions to SMS annual conferences in Stockholm (2015) and Amsterdam (2018) and three panel sessions that bring practitioners and scholars together in interactive settings.
Himanshu Vyas is the Chief Strategy Officer – Head of M&A and Strategic Partnerships, Global Financial Services at Atos. Himanshu’s current focus is to develop and execute the Atos M&A and strategic partnership-based growth strategy for the Global Financial Services Market. Around 20 years ago, he started his career as a coder for mission-critical real-time systems. Over the years he has worked in India, Canada, the USA and Sweden. Nowadays he works in the United Kingdom with a variety of international responsibilities across business development, sales and operations. Himanshu joined Atos in 2016 in his current role. He holds bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-BHU (Class of 1998), Management Education in Marketing, Finance and Organizational Leadership from the Indian School of Business (Class of 2003) and Harvard Business School (Class of 2015).
Dr Miriam Wilhelm is a full professor at the University of Vienna. She studied business adminstration in Ingolstadt, Tokyo and Berlin. Miriam obtained her PhD at the Institute of Management of the Free University of Berlin. Her current research focuses on sustainability issues in global supply chains. She is interested in supply chain governance and multi-stakeholder initiatives. She has researched this topic in a number of empircal projects in the global garment, consumer electronics and fisheries industries. Miriam has been a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo, the Social Science Center Berlin, Meiji University Tokyo and the University of Melbourne. She has also gained working experience outside academia which allowed her to build up in-depth expertise on the automotive industry where she continues to engage in teaching programs for practitioners.
Ir. Jo Sevarts is the Senior Vice President for Business Development and for the Insurance Industry, both positions on group level at Atos. He has lead multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural teams in the ICT industry for more than 25 years and has deep knowledge and expertise of Banking, Insurance and Pensions.
Jo understands the drive for digital transformation and supports clients in their digital journeys. He has strong capabilities in people management and is always focused on developing long-term relationships with clients and partners. Jo obtained a Master of Science degree in Information Technology from Eindhoven University of Technology and a postgraduate degree in Leadership from Glasgow Caledonian University.
Dan Cohen spent over 30 years leading multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural teams in global firms addressing the areas of Financial Services, Public Sector and Scientific & Technical Computing. He worked at Atos as the Group Senior Vice President – Global Financial Services, where his main focus was leading the continual transformation of Atos’ full product and service portfolio, with an emphasis on industry orientation and relationship management within Financial Services. Overtime, he has amassed a wide range of skills relating to people management and cultural change through internal and external relationships following direct and general management roles. In his 30 years with IBM he also spent time on five international assignments that took him to Europe, Asia Pacific and South America. Dan’s pro-bono work has spanned many different organizations across the globe, including board level involvement at The International School of Beijing, The Princes Trust – Edinburgh, and Chemocare – New Jersey. Dan holds a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Emory University.
Mike Schavemaker is Transformation lead for Royal Philips in the areas of Innovation and Digitalization and AI. He drives and supports both within Philips as well as with external companies to identify new areas of growth, supports decision-making processes in the front end of innovation and facilitates in creating innovation roadmaps. He particularly has specialized in Artificial Intelligence and Open Innovation and has a track-record in mobilizing and engaging crowds for breakthrough innovation purposes or breakthrough organizational change. Mike holds an MSc in Innovation and Technology from Erasmus University Rotterdam and Nanyang MBA, Singapore and an Executive Master of Business Innovation at the TiasNimbas Business School. As member of the FINDER Advisory Board, he counsels the FINDER PhDs with his industry and academic expertise and is an active contributor to the community.
Chris Vialle is Partner within Monitor Deloitte | Deloitte Consulting, focused on Strategy, Analytics and M&A within the Banking, Payments and Fintech sector, based out of Copenhagen. He serves senior leadership within Financial Services in developing strategy, addressing strategic issues and realizing transformational change. He is currently focused on the Nordic region, serving clients across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Iceland. Before joining the Nordic practice, Chris was part of the Monitor Deloitte Strategy practice in New York, and in Amsterdam, serving clients across North America, EMEA and Asia.He holds a Master’s Degree in Information Sciences (MSc) and in Business Administration (MSc) at Radboud University in Nijmegen. He is guest lecturer Corporate Strategy and has a publication in Ivey Business Journal
Prof. Dr Koen Heimeriks is a Professor of Strategy at Warwick Business School. Previously he lead a faculties at Copenhagen Business School, Rotterdam School of Management as well as Tilburg University and he has also been visiting at Aalto, Carnegie Mellon University and INSEAD. He earned his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology. Koen’s research focuses on how companies develop corporate development (i.e., alliance, acquisition and divestiture) capabilities to realize corporate growth in high-tech settings. His work features in numerous top journals, including Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, and Strategic Organization. Besides his research, he trains, consults for, and works with executives at publicly listed and large private firms operating in volatile settings, e.g., high-tech and chemical industries with a focus on corporate development and entrepreneurship, strategy, organizational change and growth strategies. Both his research and teaching won him prestigious international prizes.
Prof. Dr Hans van Kranenburg is a full Professor of Corporate Strategy at Radboud University Nijmegen. Professor Van Kranenburg is Head of the Strategy Group at the Department of Business Administration. He has previously been a visiting scholar at the University of Oxford, Media Management and Transformation Centre at the Jönköping International Business School (Sweden), the University of Navarra (Spain) and the University of Chicago (USA). He was Head of Business Administration and Director of the Research Programme Responsible Organisation at the Nijmegen School of Management. He has published on various subjects, including the strategic behaviour of organisations, industry dynamics, alliances and networks, foreign direct investments and non-market strategies.
Dr. Koen van den Oever is an Associate Professor of Strategy at the Nijmegen School of Management (PhD from Tilburg University). His research is published in the Strategic Management Journal and is centered around three main topics: strategic decision-making, board of director composition, and interorganizational relationships (IORs). In short, he uses a behavioral lens to study when organizations engage in IORs, the influence of board of director composition on the strategic decision-making process, and how different forms of decision-making affect organization’s behavior (in IORs). His dissertation on strategic decision-making for organizational change was finalist for the best dissertation award 2018 by the Strategic Management division of the Academy of Management.
Dr ir Fleur Deken is a Full Professor Organizing for Innovation Processes at VU University Amsterdam, School of Business and Economics. Her research focuses on collaborative innovation. Currently she is involved in research projects on crossover collaborations between organizations from different sectors and the role of design thinking in digital innovation. Her theoretical interests lie in social practices and process research. She holds a PhD from the Delft University of Technology (cum laude), an MSc (cum laude) in Strategic Product Design (Delft University of Technology), a BSc in Psychology (University of Amsterdam) and Industrial Design Engineering (Delft University of Technology). She has published in Design Studies, Journal of Engineering Design, Research in Engineering Design and in a various conferences such as the Academy of Management Meeting and at the European Group of Organization Studies conference. She teaches courses on technology and innovation, qualitative research methods, and statistics.
Dr Sebastian Schäfer is the Managing Director TechQuartier. Sebastian is a Cambridge-born behavioral economist and innovation enthusiast. As entrepreneur and lecturer, he has been engaged in building a dynamic startup scene in the Metropolitan region for many years. Prior to founding TechQuartier, Sebastian was head of Goethe University’s Business Incubator and research fellow at the Management and Microeconomics department. He lectures at Goethe Business School and is associated with the Center for Leadership and Behavior in Organizations and the Frankfurt Laboratory of Experimental Economics at Goethe University.
Jean-Francois Zehner is the Head of the Deal Competence Center in Atos Global Financial Services. Jean-Francois shares his passion for operational excellence to nurture sustainable relationships and mutually profitable agreements with key clients. Jean-Francois is a seasoned executive who masters the challenges of accelerated transformation across large complex organizations. Focused on multi-cultural team management, he insists on carefully planned execution to deliver tangible results.
Philipp Tuertscher is an Associate Professor of Technology and Innovation at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation at VU Amsterdam. He has obtained a PhD in Management from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Before joining VU Amsterdam, Philipp worked as an Assistant Professor at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Pennsylvania State University. His research explores collaborative innovation in a variety of settings. Besides studying large-scale scientific collaborations at CERN, Philipp has been studying innovation processes in crowdsourcing and collaborative online communities such as Linux, Wikipedia, and Threadless. His work has been presented at international conferences and published in leading journals including Academy of Management Annals, Organization Science, Information Systems Research, and Organization Studies.
dr. K.J. (Killian) McCarthy is an Associate Professor of Strategy (Tenured) at Radboud University, and prior to that at Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, specializing in Innovation Management & Strategy . Killian is trained as an economist; he has a BSc in Economics (Cork), an MSc in Economics & Law (Utrecht), a Research Masters in Economics (Utrecht and Vienna), and a PhD in Economics (Groningen). Today he primarily works on topics relating to corporate strategy, but has worked and continues to publish too on topics like money laundering and international tax competition. His expertise is the consequence of (international) mergers and acquisitions on the financial and innovation-based performance of the initiating firm as well as the disciplines of international business, strategic management, innovation and technology management.
Frederik Kerling – Head of FinTech and Quantum industry Director – Global Financial Services and member of the Scientific Community. Frederik is a Senior Quantum Expert with a background in theoretical physics specializing in Quantum engineering who has since made the transition into consulting, cybersecurity, and finance. Frederik teaches courses in quantum and cybersecurity at multiple universities and work in business and patent development. He specializes in bridging the gap between complicated technologies and realistic commercially viable business outcomes. After 8 years of experience as a cybersecurity, innovation, and quantum consultant, he is currently heading the FinTech Engagement program with Remco
Et al. (additional profiles will follow shortly)
The FINDER program is rooted in the wish, and necessity, to enable students to study and benefit from both academic and industrial processes and knowledge. These two worlds are not exclusive after all, but very much intertwined.
This eBook compiled by the FINDER crew attests to the various angles the FINDER project has explored over the past years in close collaboration between Radboud University, Atos and the business partners including TechQuartier and Voleo. Akin in extreme sports, where participants push themselves to their physical limits by performing dangerous activities, in academic research and training that takes place on the crossroads of business and science the team sought after new horizons and took risks by exploring new and uncharted areas of knowledge. Where inn sports, athletes work together to improve their team’s overall performance, similarly, the FINDER crew collaborated with many others to ramp up their learning, to collect and analyze both qualitative and quantitative inputs, reporting on their data amongst other by means of this eBook.
This project (FINDER) has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 813095.
