WELCOME

About Myself

Hi there. I am glad you stopped by my personal web page. I am a Professor of Finance at EBS Business School and hold the Chair of Corporate Finance and Higher Education Finance there. Furthermore, I am the Managing Director of XOLAS ADVISORS, a consultancy company that targets higher education institutions as clients.

My current areas of interest are anything related to risk management, restructuring, and organizational resilience. This also defines my perspective when studying corporate finance topics such as venture capital and private equity or when analyzing higher education and business school issues. My current work also focuses on network analysis and ecosystems.

I have mixed academic work with managerial and administrative posts throughout my career. For the past 16 years, I have held various executive roles at EFMD and EFMD Global. In the past, I have also been Dean and Rector of EBS and Managing Director of EBS gGmbH. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (GO BLUE!), and have been awarded a Dr. habil in Business Administration by the WHU, Germany.

News

Rethinking Internationalization in Higher Education: Should Universities Start Thinking About Resilience Over Optimization?

(April 2026) Internationalization in higher education has increasingly become a numbers game—more students, more partnerships, more mobility. In our recent article in QS Insights Magazine, my co-authors Soheil Davari, Martin Meyer, Benjamin Laker, and I argue that the more relevant question is no longer how much, but why. In a more volatile geopolitical environment, internationalization needs to shift from scale to intentionality: success should be judged by the quality, resilience, and integrity of global engagement, not just by volume.

Our argument builds on the observation that universities are effectively managing portfolios of international activities, often without a clearly articulated purpose. It may be time to move from expansion to selectivity, from activity to impact, and from mobility to meaningful engagement. The uncomfortable but necessary question we pose is, "Which parts of an institution’s international footprint would actually hold up under stress?"

The article has been published in QS Insights Magazine and is available here.

How (Not) to Cope with a Deficit

(2 July 2025) Many attempts to restructure failing higher education institutions are ill-fated from the start. Many attempts to restructure failing higher education institutions fail to consider their unique organizational structure and address financial shortfalls with ineffective cost-cutting measures, which ultimately lead to the destruction of valuable assets. Together with Wolfram Berger, I am proposing an alternative viewpoint on how to make institutional turn-around and renewal a success.

The article has been published in University World News and can be accessed here.

For older news postings, click here.

Blog Articles on Medium

You can visit my occasional article series on higher education, especially business schools, on the online publishing platform Medium. I also post links to new articles on LinkedIn and other social media platforms.

»Forecasting Admissions in a Fragmented Market: A Framework for International Business Schools« (20 April 2026)
»Thinking as a Civic Act: What Three Radical Women Can Teach Us About University Learning« (14 April 2026)
»The Empty Seat Problem: What It Really Means When Business School Students Stop Coming to Class« (26 March 2026)
»Against Frictionless Learning: Edith Stein, AI, and the Soul of Education« (17 March 2026)
»Want to Become a Business School Dean? Better Do Your Due Diligence First!« (9 March 2026)
»Less Theorizing, More Action: What Can Business Schools Learn from Pope Francis?« (20 February 2026)
»Build the Next-Gen Business School: How Emerging Schools Can Leapfrog the Crisis of Campus-Based Education« (12 February 2026)
»University Restructuring: Often Toxic Medicine for Business Schools« (10 June 2025)
»The Dean: A Business School's Greatest Risk« (2 April 2025)

Research Publications

Venture Financing

»Corporate Venture Capital Unit Governance and Firm Values«, in: Venture Capital, pp. 1-30, DOI 10.1080/13691066.2025.2478841 (with N. Bani-Harouni).

»Venture Professionalization«, in: D. J. Cumming, B. Hammer (editors): The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Private Equity, London et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2025 (with J. Königseder).

De-Institutionalization of Management Education

»Beyond the "School" as the Object of Assessment: Sector Disruption and the Changing Nature of Business School Accreditation«, in: M. R. Fellenz, S. Hoidn, M. Brady (editors): The Future of Management Education, Abingdon: Routledge, 2022, pp. 207-224, DOI: 10.4324/9781003095903-16 (with K. Vandenbempt).

»Shared Learning in Higher Education: Toward a Digitally-Induced Model«, in: A. Kaplan (editor): Digital Transformation and Disruption in Higher Education, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 239-254 (with K. Peters).

»Squeezing the Middle: The Consequences of Quality Oversight in Management Education«, in: Journal of the Knowledge Economy, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2021, pp. 96-114, DOI: 10.1007/s13132-018-0559-4 (with B. Woods).

»De-Institutionalization of Management Education in the Post-Pandemic World: East-West Perspectives«, in: H. Chaturvedi, A. K. Dey (editors), The New Normal: Challenges of Managing Business, Social & Ecological Systems in the Post-COVID-19 Era, New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2021, pp. 51-67 (with A. Chattopadhyay).

Responsible Management Education

»COVID-19: Accelerator or Demolisher of the RME Agenda?«, in: Journal of Global Responsibility, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2021, pp. 87-100, DOI: 10.1108/JGR-12-2020-0109 (with M. Falkenstein, A. Snelson-Powell). Get the pdf here.

Payment Service Provision / Digital Payments

»Payment Service Provision in Times of Accelerated Market Growth and Regulatory Change: The Case of India«, in: Journal of Payment Strategy & Systems, Vol. 17, No. 3, 2023, pp. 271-290 (with N. Bartelt, R. Patel, S. Ali).

»Regulatorische und betriebswirtschaftliche Anforderungen an das ökonomische Risikomanagement für Payment Service Provider« in: Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen (ZfgK), No. 22 (November), 2022, pp. 21-27 (with N. Bartelt, W. Gleissner).

»The Evolving Role of the Collecting Model in the Payment Service Provider Market«, in: Journal of Payment Strategy & Systems, Vol. 15, No. 3, 2021, pp. 250-259 (with N. Bartelt).

»Payment Service Provider in Deutschland - Hidden Champions?«, in: Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen (ZfgK), No. 9 (May), 2021, pp. 32-37 (with N. Bartelt).

»Did Wirecard Ever Matter? Reflections on the Structure of the German eCommerce Payment Service Provider Market«, in: Journal of Payment Strategy & Systems, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 2021, pp. 67-78 (with N. Bartelt).

Banner Credit: Photo by Karl Anderson on Unsplash

Google Sites

Report abuse