About Us

Professional technology and innovation management is becoming increasingly important for companies so as to withstand ever tougher competition. The TIM Group at TUM, led by Prof. Dr. Joachim Henkel, has done teaching and research on this topic since January 2005.

In our teaching, we try to convey to our students a sound understanding of innovation processes and the tools required to manage these processes. In particular, we aim to make students aware of the barriers between business administration and engineering in companies, and to enable them to overcome these barriers.

Especially in German technology-based companies, such barriers often hamper a successful commercialization of new technologies. To prepare students for their careers in an increasingly internationalized environment and to facilitate the exchange with foreign partner universities, our core courses are taught in English. They are supported and complemented by innovative guest speakers from leading innovative companies such as BMW, Cisco, Infineon, Intel, MAN, SAP, and Siemens.

In research, our focus is on open and distributed innovation processes as well as patent management. The former includes, among other topics, user innovations, the development of open source software, and the question of whether and when companies should make their innovations public. Related to patents we study, e.g., patent infringements, filing strategies, and interactions between patents and other protection mechanisms. Further topics include technology transfer from universities and the evaluation of start-up through venture capital firms. Methodically, empirical approaches have priority in our research.