The Institute for Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) under the direction of Prof. Dr. Antons, Prof. Dr. Piller & Prof. Salge, PhD is part of the Research Area “Technology, Innovation, Marketing & Entrepreneurship”, short TIME. The Research Area pursues an ambitious teaching and research program with a clear focus on the conception, development and commercialization of technological innovations. This includes not only elements of economic and business research, but also attempts to build bridges to the engineering and natural sciences.
Prof. Dr. Frank Piller
Head of Chair of the Institute for Technology & Innovation Management
RWTH Aachen University
Often quoted in the business press, Prof. Dr. Frank Piller is considered one of the leading German experts for innovation management, in particular open innovation, customer co-creation and product individualization. His research work has received numerous awards, most recently the PDMA Co-Creation Award or the nomination for the “Innovating Innovation” award from Harvard Business Review and McKinsey. For many years, Prof. Frank Piller has researched the design of customer-centric innovation and value creation processes, the successful management of radical business model innovations and the use of external knowledge for the innovation process. Since mid-2007 he has been full professor for technology and innovation management at RWTH Aachen University. At the RWTH Aachen he is also the Academic Director of the Executive MBA of the RWTH Aachen. He previously worked at the MIT Sloan School of Management (2004-2007) and the TU Munich. Frank Piller received his doctorate in Mass Customization from the University of Würzburg (2000) and habilitated in 2004 on Open Innovation and User Innovation at the TUM Business School, TU Munich, where he headed the research group “Customer Driven Value Creation” at Prof. Ralf Reichwald’s IOM chair.
