The Institute for Higher Education Management is part of the Department of Strategy and Innovation at WU and is led by Univ. Prof. Dr. Barbara Sporn.

IHM activities include research, teaching, policy advising and external engagement with different stakeholders, as well as involvement in international associations. Areas of interest at IHM combine theories of business and management applied to the complex organization of universities. With this focus, IHM provides insights for higher education scholars and practitioners but also beyond that for research and practice interested in expert and nonprofit organizational settings.

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Publications

As 2024 is drawing to a close, the IHM Team is pleased to look back to a successful year. Below is a recap of what our team managed to accomplish throughout this year:

• Our PhD assistants, Ana Godonoga and Bernhard Böhm, successfully defended their dissertations! Congratulations to both and all the best for their next professional chapters!

• We published a special issue, titled “Higher Education Institutions as Change Agents in Society: Perspectives on Adaptation and Impact” as a follow-up to the CHER 2023 Conference.

• We supervised thirteen student theses on contemporary topics, including AI, sustainability, responsible leadership, university-industry collaboration and more!

• Collectively, we had the pleasure to engage with hundreds of WU and exchange students inside and outside the classroom, and discuss and reflect on the role of strategy, innovation, leadership, business planning and performance in organizations.

• We are grateful to have hosted four brilliant guest speakers, including Prof. Cláudia Sarrico, Prof. Bjørn Stensaker, Prof. Pedro Teixeira and Prof. Marijk van der Wende, who shared their valuable work in our classes and Speaker Series. We thank them for their expert advice, collegiality and friendship throughout the years!

We look forward to what the next year brings! In the meantime, the IHM team wishes you and your dear ones a festive holiday season and all the best for the year 2025!

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Special Issue (SI) “Higher education institutions as change agents in society: Perspectives on Adaptation and Impact”, co-edited by Barbara Sporn and Ana Godonoga. As a follow-up to the 2023 CHER Conference, the SI features seven articles that examine how higher education adapts to multiple and often conflicting demands, and how through adaptive capacity, universities can become more active change agents in society. Check out the collection here.

We are happy to share that our colleague, Ana Godonoga, was accepted as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University during Spring 2024. She had the opportunity to attend classes, meet esteemed faculty and present her current study “What influences the adoption of social impact practices in business schools? Findings from a global survey” at the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research (SCANCOR). Ana summarizes her reflections on this invaluable research visit in a report that can be found here.

During the upcoming winter term we offer the following courses with interesting (guest-)lecturer:

LV 2325: Strategic Leadership

LV 2305 + 2307: Strategie und Innovation

LV 2295: Fundamentals of Strategic Management and Leadership

LV 1196: Leading Complex Organizations

LV 1198: Research in Higher Education Science and Management

The WU Course Catalogue for the winter term with dates and details can be found here.

After three years of ongoing collaboration of the Institute for Higher Education Management with the World Food Programme this year, the partnership has taken a strategic turn towards artificial intelligence (AI), with students tackling three critical areas: curating e-learning experiences, enhancing knowledge capture and discovery, and improving knowledge storage and retrieval for WFP with the aim of deepening the collaboration with AI and innovation.

Over the past three years, more than 100 students from WU have engaged with WFP, offering over 70 targeted recommendations that have significantly supported the organization’s approach to innovation and knowledge management.

“We’re incredibly proud that our students are repeatedly contributing outstanding work for WFP,” said Bernhard Böhm, Lecturer of the Business Planning and Performance Management Course. “Manifesting this collaboration and taking it to the next level is of key importance to us.”

The 2024 cohort’s focus on AI-enabled solutions marks a pivotal enhancement in how knowledge management can drive WFP’s humanitarian and development work forward.

As WFP and WU prepare to expand their collaborative efforts, WFP and WU are setting a standard for how academic institutions and global agencies can work together to address some of the most pressing issues of our times.

The detailed blog article of WFP regard the collaboration including the results from the 2024 cohort can be found here: https://bit.ly/WFP-IA-wu-collaboration.

The Institute for Higher Education Management and the World Food Programme (WFP) agreed on a dynamic collaboration aimed at fostering innovation in the fight against global hunger.

The collaboration builds on the success of a previous partnership between WFP and the Institute for Higher Education Management, in which, for the past two years, students from the SIMC Master’s Programme, have contributed to WFP’s innovation and knowledge management work through recommendations around crucial areas such as culture, knowledge management approaches, governance, and innovative technology.

The partnership has proven mutually beneficial by offering students valuable opportunities for internships and networking.

The collaboration will extend to various domains, including joint publication and thesis collaboration, research projects, knowledge and expertise exchange, innovation research and exchange by leveraging the Innovation Accelerator’s experience, and the integration of real-world problem-solving into the Master’s Programme on Strategy, Innovation, and Management Control (SIMC) at WU.

We’re looking forward for much more to come!

The SIMC Master program was again able to achieve a top placement in the QS Master in Management Ranking and is now in the excellent 10th place (out of 148). This meant that SIMC was able to position itself among the top 5% globally. Details about the ranking can be found here. For more information about the SIMC Master at the Department of Strategy and Innovation, please visit the website: 

Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien: Overview - Strategy, Innovation and Management Control - Master’s Programs (wu.ac.at)

We are happy to share that the article "The conceptualisation of socially responsible universities in higher education research: a systematic literature review", authored by Ana Godonoga and Prof. Barbara Sporn is now published open access in the journal Studies in Higher Education! If you are interested to learn more about what it means to be a socially responsible university, please check our work here!