Oliver Baumann

Oliver Baumann

Professor of Strategic Organization Design, University of Southern Denmark

About me

Curriculum Vitae (December 2023)

I am an industrial engineer turned organizational scholar. I am fascinated by the notion of organizations as complex adaptive systems and by the power of computational social science for understanding their dynamics. My research focuses on questions at the intersection of organizational design, strategy, and innovation. It is mainly theoretical, but seeks to build bridges to various application domains such as corporate strategy or new product development. In particular, I address 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, I work primarily with computational models, but have 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), I am currently migrating several computational models of multi-actor organizations into web-based experimental platforms, using them to conduct laboratory and online experiments.

Currently a co-editor of the Journal of Organization Design (2021-), I am on the editorial boards of Academy of Management Discoveries, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal. My research has been published in Administrative Science Quarterly, Advances in Strategic Management, Journal of Management, Organization Science, and the Strategic Management Journal, among others.

I am a Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), where I am Head of the Strategic Organization Design unit. At SDU, I am currently a member of the academic council at the Faculty of Business and Social Sciences, and am also associated with the Digital Democracy Center, the eScience Center, and the Security and Defense network.

I 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, I was a visiting scholar at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an Assistant Professor at LMU Munich.