Welcome. I am a full professor (hoogleraar) of Corporate Restructuring and Innovation at Radboud University, Nijmegen School of Management and affiliated with the Institute of Management Research, the Netherlands where I founded and direct the Centre for Organization Restructuring. For over twenty years now I have been researching, consulting, and teaching on organization restructuring and how organizational and network analytics can be of value added to resolve critical business issues varying from voluntary innovation to necessary reorganization. Informed by the fields of strategic management and the behavioral sciences, my research centers on both the uptimes and downtimes an organization can endure: navigating corporate innovation and reorganization in the process.
I have been involved with these topics – both corporate restructuring and corporate innovation – from a business perspective as a consultant and manager at Deloitte Consulting, and have spent the last decade researching them as an academic. I wrote my dissertation thesis at the University of Groningen on the topic of the evolution of intra-organization networks. My consulting and academic work also got me engaged in various projects on strategic change to companies across Europe. I currently serve as a member of the editorial board of Journal of Management Studies and as a visiting scholar at the Tokyo Institute of Technology where I focus on health tech M&A and tech driven innovation. Prior I was a visiting scholar at Imperial College London, the National University of Ireland and Tokyo Institute of Technology around the themes of network analytics and organization restructuring.
Both of these themes also resonate in the technology inspired EC funded research program that I currently coordinate and to which I served as main applicant: FINDER. FINDER is a collaboration between Radboud University and Atos together with various other prominent partners of which among others Warwick Business School, KU Leuven, University of Groningen and the Free University (Amsterdam). The initiative is the outcome of a competitive Marie Curie Research and Training Program funded by the European Committee and stands for: Fostering Innovation Networks in a Digital Era in which a number of excellent PhD fellows are set out to explore how we can Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era as a society. The scoping is set to investigate the innovative collaborative arrangement among organizations – grassroots, incumbents and the wider society – as they inclusively explore digital technology for new product or market development. An exciting journey that promises exciting outcomes.
All my research pivots on the intersection between academia and business in which I prefer a multidisciplinary approach to drive fresh ideas and to keep things exciting. Over the years I have worked with a variety of organizations from this agnle (a.o. Philips, BDO, Siemens, Equens Wordline, ING, EY Pantheon, German fintech incubator TechQuartier, Deloitte, ATOS, Ministry of Justice, and last – but in the context of innovation certainly not least – a diversity of SME’s) on a variety of solutions including new business development, innovation policy, scenario analysis and reorganization strategies. In my academic capacity I served on expert panels from the European Commission as well as nationally for National Science Foundation (NWO) and the WODC/Ministry of Justice. I serve for over a decade now on the editorial board of one of our leading management journals in the field, the Journal of Management Studies. Additionally I ongoingly engage with the business community, for instance in a consulting or advisory board membership capacity of sorts.
My academic work was published in leading international academic journals such as Harvard Business Review, Research Policy, Long Range Planning, Journal of Product Innovation Management and MIT Sloan Management Review, among others.
To keep things in balance I enjoy spending my free time with my family, eat, sleep, delve into outdoor sports and volunteer with the local firefighting department.
This platform provides a selection of insights rendered from the above projects for those interested. By all means feel free to reach out to discuss on any of the above themes in more detail.
Rick Aalbers
