Work at IfU, previous experience and academic profile

Markus is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Strategy and Managerial Accounting (IfU). Earlier in his academic career, he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at AAU Klagenfurt and as a Research and Teaching Associate at WU Vienna. He holds a Doctoral and Master’s degree from WU Vienna, as well as a Master’s degree in international management from the CEMS MIM program. During his studies, he spent semesters at Rotterdam School of Management (The Netherlands) and Bentley University (USA).

Before joining academia, Markus worked as a strategy consultant at Boston Consulting Group, where he gained experience in the high-​tech and financial industries on a diverse set of international projects. During his studies, he also completed several internships in management accounting and control within these industries.

Markus has both developed and taught a wide variety of courses on the undergraduate and graduate level, including fields like management accounting and control, data analytics, business analysis and forecasting, consulting, strategic management, project management, and academic writing. The course settings ranged from lecture-style classes to problem-based learning, simulation-based business games, and real-life consulting projects. Apart from small- to medium-sized classes, Markus also has experience with managing large-scale courses (2.000+ students) and was part of a team to receive an Excellence in Teaching Award for their work on them.

Research interest

Markus’ principal research interest lies at the intersection of management accounting and control systems and innovation. In his dissertation project, he studied the role that organizational incentive systems may play in guiding R&D-​employees’ behavior and how this, in turn, may drive a firm’s innovation performance. In his other projects, Markus studies how management controls may help translate innovation capability into performance, how unintended consequences of nonfinancial innovation-​related measures in performance evaluation may be alleviated, and how job design, performance evaluation, and supervisors may mitigate the loss of creative talent in organizations. Methodologically, most studies combine survey data with archival (e.g., patent-​based) elements.

The results of Markus’ research have been published in Accounting, Organizations and Society and the Journal of Management Accounting Research. For his dissertation, Markus has received WU’s Stephan-​Koren-Award and the “Péter-​Horváth-​Controllingpreis 2019” for the best management control-​related dissertation in German-​speaking countries.