Melanie Wiener joined the Institute of Strategic Management at Johannes Kepler University (JKU) as a post-doctoral researcher in February 2020. Before joining ISM Melanie was deputy head (04/2018 - 11/2019) and post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Integrated Quality Design at JKU. She holds a PhD from JKU Linz with guest research visits at the Aalborg University (DEN) and Aarhus University (DEN). Her doctoral dissertation, “open-foresight and corporate culture,” included theory-building on the organizational settings needed to enhance the success of collaborative open foresight with an emphasis on culture, the role of top management, and open foresight team composition. The dissertation was recognized with the Tudor Rickards and Susan Moger CIM Best Paper Award for its academic relevance and the Karl Leitl Partnership Award for outstanding contributions to the field of inter-organizational collaboration.

Melanie’s research interests include strategic and behavioral questions in open strategy and open foresight, sustainability-oriented innovation, as well as circular economy. As an early career scholar, she had the pleasure to present her research over 25 times at leading conferences such as the SMS Conference, AOM Annual Meeting, the R&D Management Conference, ISPIM, EURAM, EGOS, the CINet Conference and Scenario Planning and Foresight. This has led to twelve academic journal articles, a monograph with Springer, and various practitioner articles. Besides her engagement at JKU, she is board member of the global Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) and has five years of experience in collaborative strategic foresight initiatives in a number of different fields.

JKU Business School Rising Scholars are post-doctoral candidates who work at one of the JKU Business School’s supporting institutes and have published outside their dissertation work over the past two years.