Entrepreneurship and sustainable regional development

Rethinking non-core regions - planning beyond growth

In an article with Thilo Lang, published in 2018 in "European Planning Studies" (ABS JG 2-star journal), we conceptualise planning strategies for non-core regions which do no longer experience economic growth and development. Non-core regions are conceptualised from a social constructivist perspective that avoids dichotomous categories, such as "centre" and "periphery". The paper, moreover, pleads for novel approaches to planning for and in such regions, which go beyond the assumption of continuous economic growth.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09654313.2017.1363398 

Demographic change: Firms, institutions and the regional economy 

Questions of regional growth and development are increasingly gaining in importance when we consider demographic challenges. My habilitation thesis (qualification for a full-professorship in the German system, corresponding to HDR) was devoted to studying the link between demographic change, firms and institutions in regional economies. 

The thesis was organised around three distinct gaps identified in the contemporary research streams on the topic of demographic change, both in the area of regional studies, economic and human geography, and in the broader discipline of the social sciences, including business administration and economics: a) the conceptualisation of demographic change; b) the understanding of transmission mechanisms from the regional economy at microspatial level; and c) the understanding of institutionalised practices by firms in the context of localised demographic change. 

epub.uni-bayreuth.de/id/eprint/3734 

Institutional entrepreneurs and small firms: How firm practices are being shaped in the context of demographic transformations

Using the concept of institutional entrepreneurship, this paper - published in 2017 in "Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship" - examines how change agents interact with firms to shape their existing practices to cope with demographic change in their local economies. Demographic challenges are considered to lead to fundamental market transformations, generating considerable uncertainty, notably for small and locally embedded firms. Based upon a case study from local economies in Germany that face demographic challenges, the paper demonstrates how such institutional entrepreneurs work to influence firms, steering the renewal of their existing practices towards adaptation to market change. The study first highlights the inspiration, vision, and power of such agents to promote and introduce new patterns of behavior and then elaborates how institutional entrepreneurship unfolds in a context where uncertainty and lack of consciousness for long-term market changes are prevalent among particularly small firms that are locally embedded in economies facing such change. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/08276331.2016.1248055

Entrepreneurship and ageing: An economic geography perspective

With Heike Mayer, I have written a book chapter on entrepreneurship and ageing from an economic geography and regional economic development perspective: Old-age entrepreneurship is placed into a regional context in this chapter, and it is illustrated how both opportunities and constraints arise from different regional contexts, in particular from demographic change occurring in different regional types. 

CRED Research Paper No. 22, University Bern, Switzerland