Prof. Alexander Brem has taken up the new Endowed Chair at the University of Stuttgart “Entrepreneurship in Technology and Digitization”. The successful company founder was previously Professor of Technology Management at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and is one of the top business researchers in the German-speaking countries.
“With Alexander Brem we have been able to win the services of a proven expert in entrepreneurship for research and teaching at our university”, said Prof. Wolfram Ressel, Rector at the University of Stuttgart. “We’re happy to be working closely together with him on strategic future projects run by the University of Stuttgart and the state of Baden-Württemberg such as the Cyber Valley Baden-Württemberg and the research campus ARENA2036, as well as the start-up innovation platform STARTUP AUTOBAHN which is based there. By working across different faculties and closely linking theory and practice, the professorship will also make a significant contribution to the planned Entrepreneurship Center of the University of Stuttgart, which has strong local roots but is outward in its focus.
“The University of Stuttgart offers outstanding opportunities to develop a lively and energetic culture of entrepreneurship in research, teaching and transfer, thanks to its strategic networking in science, business and society in one of the most significant high-tech regions in Europe. I am very happy to be able to play a key role in such varied and trend-setting opportunities for cooperation, and to develop the Stuttgart Way consistently across disciplines”, emphasized Brem, who has a degree in business administration, upon taking up his post at the University of Stuttgart. His research strength in technology-based innovation and entrepreneurship will form a major contribution to this, whereby aspects of the digital transformation are set to be a particular focus.
The Endowed Chair is based in Faculty 10 (Economics and Social Sciences) of the University of Stuttgart with a new institute, and is supported by the Daimler fund in the Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities.
About Prof. Alexander Brem
After studying Business Administration, where he specialized in entrepreneurship, Alexander Brem worked as a research assistant at the Chair of Industrial Management at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. At the same time as this, he founded VEND consulting GmbH along with three fellow students, which was awarded with the German Entrepreneur Award. After finishing his doctorate in the fall of 2007, Brem was active as CEO and advisor, and among other things accompanied the founding of Agrolytix GmbH. For his work with this company, Professor Brem was nominated for the University Founders’ Award, and won the Germany-wide Science4Life start-up competition as well as the North Bavarian business plan competition. Furthermore, Prof. Brem is a founder member and Vice Chairman of “quer.kraft – der Innovationsverein e.V.”.
From 2011 to 2014, he held the Junior Professorship for Ideas and Innovation Management at the FAU, and subsequently spent roughly three years leading the “Innovation and Design Engineering” interdisciplinary section, among other things, as Professor for Technology and Innovation Management at Syddansk Universitet (SDU). From December 2016 to December 2019, he held the Chair of Technology Management at the Nuremberg Campus of Technology at the FAU. In 2017, he was named as Honorary Professor at the SDU and in 2018 as IEEE Senior Member.
Four Cyber Valley scientists at the University of Stuttgart
With Prof. Alexander Brem, there are now four Cyber Valley scientists working at the University of Stuttgart. Michael Sedlmair, who is junior professor at the Institute for Visualization and Interactive Systems (VIS), works in the department of Augmented and Virtual Reality. Dr. Tian Qiu leads the Cyber Valley research group “Biomedical Microsystems” at the Institute of Physical Chemistry (IPC). Prof. Steffen Staab succeeded to the “Data Analytics” professorship in February 2020, and will drive the founding of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence forward. Its focus is in the field of semantic technologies.
About Cyber Valley
The Cyber Valley is the biggest research collaboration in Europe in the field of artificial intelligence, with partners from politics, science, business and society. The partnership strengthens research and teaching in the fields of machine learning, computer vision and robotics, as well as the connections between these scientific disciplines. The partners include the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, the universities of Tübingen and Stuttgart, the state of Baden-Württemberg as well as seven industrial companies: Amazon, the BMW Group, Daimler AG, IAV GmbH, Porsche AG, Robert Bosch GmbH and ZF Friedrichshafen AG. The Cyber Valley is also supported by the Christian Bürkert Foundation, the Gips-Schüle Foundation, the Vector Foundation as well as the Carl-Zeiss Foundation.