On October 27th, 2020, Prof. Christopher Lettl, head of the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization, held a virtual lecture during the Global Seminar Series initiative on "Back to the Future: The Innovation of Business in a Post Pandemic World". The lecture was streamed live to select students and interested faculty of the WU, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel), the University of Leeds (UK), Universidad de San Andrés (Argentina) and the North Carolina State University (US).

The topic of Prof. Christopher Lettl's lecture was "Tackling Crisis by Democratizing Innovation". The lecture discusses the shift from a producer-centered innovation paradigm towards a user-centered and collaborative innovation paradigm. Such a paradigm shift, which essentially means that innovation is becoming increasingly democratized, has numerous implications on where and how innovation emerges and how producer firms need to adapt in order to benefit from these disruptive changes. It also has major implications on how a crisis (like Covid-19) can be tackled. The lecture uses a variety of examples and mini-cases to illustrate the arguments.

Details on the Global Seminar Series can be found below: