Corrina Schaffer is a PhD fellow at UNU-MERIT and the BMW Group. She holds a master's degree in International Economics & Governance and a bachelor's degree in Business Administration from the University of Bayreuth.
The goal of her PhD research is to provide scientifically based recommendations for the design of decision-making processes in international R&D cooperations.
The use of R&D cooperations in the automotive industry increases with the goal to share risk and costs and to improve innovation capabilities. One important reason for high failure rates is the managerial complexity, which will be addressed in her research project.
Based on an analysis of decision-making processes in the automotive R&D taken into account the complexity of the product and the processes, challenges and solutions are developed for different forms of cooperations. The efficient dealing with managerial complexity reduces the risk of cooperation failure and therefore contributes to the innovative performance of international R&D cooperations.
The thesis is supervised by Prof. John Hagedoorn.