3 July 2025

The scientific study "The Impact of Top Management Team Dynamics on Business Model Innovation" received two awards in 2025 - proof of its high relevance in times of economic and technological upheaval.

The research analyses how dynamics within top management teams - such as turnover, tenure and diversity of tenure - influence the innovative capacity of companies at the level of their business models. The empirical basis of the study is a 16-year panel data set of 80 listed German companies.

The scientific study "The Impact of Top Management Team Dynamics on Business Model Innovation" was honoured with two prestigious awards in 2025. The recognition with the Best Paper Award at the EUROPEAN ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT (EURAM) Conference 2025 in the "Strategic Management" track and the Best Paper Runner-Up Award at the R&D Management Conference 2025 underline the international relevance of the research work. This is the third award in a year for the research team, having already received the FGF Norbert Szyperski Technology and Innovation Management Award 2024 from the Research Network for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and SMEs last year.

The current study centres on the question of how dynamics within top management teams - in particular fluctuation, tenure and diversity of tenure - affect a company's ability to innovate. The focus is on business model innovation (BMI), which is becoming increasingly important in times of shortening innovation cycles. Using a panel data set of 80 listed German companies over a period of 16 years, the authors analyse how management constellations affect innovation performance in different phases.

The results show that incremental business model innovation - characterised by stability and successive development - is particularly successful when the members of top management have long terms of office. For radical business model innovation, which is characterised by strategic realignment and radical upheaval, companies benefit from moderate fluctuation and diversity of tenure in the management team. The study therefore not only contributes to the further development of upper echelons theory, but also positions management dynamics as a decisive lever for the innovative capacity of organisations.

The study was written by Prof Dr Lutz Göcke (Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences), Prof Dr Matthias Menter (Friedrich Schiller University Jena) and Max Schülting (Friedrich Schiller University Jena). The team of authors would like to thank the conference organisers and all reviewers for their valuable feedback in the peer review process.

The research findings will be further developed in future and applied in theory and practice - particularly with regard to the strategic orientation of management teams in transformation phases. In addition, Prof. Göcke's research is continuously applied in the courses of the Digital Product Management (B.A.) and Innovation and Change Management (M.A.) degree programmes at Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences.