Prof. Dr. Christoph Seckler is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurial Strategy at ESCP Business School in Berlin. He holds the Chair of Entrepreneurial Strategy, he is the Academic Director of U-SCHOOL, and he co-founded the Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship. In 2021, the German magazine Capital included him in its "Top 40 Under 40" and in its "Top 10 Upcoming Business Scholars". In 2016/2017, he was a Visiting Research Fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford.
Christoph believes that entrepreneurship can be a force for good in society; at least, one idea at a time. For him, entrepreneurship goes beyond starting a startup. It means developing novel solutions for people’s needs. This can be anything from a novel search algorithm to make the world’s information universally accessible (Google) to a novel microcredit service to fight poverty (Grameen Bank). He aims at fostering entrepreneurship through his research, teaching, as well as through design science projects.
His research converges around the question of how to leverage adversity. This means he is interested in how individuals, teams, and organizations can overcome and benefit from challenging situations. He studies, for example, how entrepreneurs can learn from failure, how teams are able to develop resilience in error-prone environments, or how firms develop capabilities to take advantage of quickly changing environments. Previous research on these topics has been published in leading international journals such as Accounting Organizations and Society, Journal of Management Studies, and Academy of Management Discoveries. His research has received multiple international awards, for example, at the Academy of Management Conference.
In his teaching, Christoph's ambition is to empower people to make a difference. He believes that this requires an educational approach that goes beyond the sharing of knowledge. His ambition is to help people to develop in their "thinking," "doing," and "being." His teaching has a strong emphasis on action and interaction in the classroom by drawing on teaching approaches such as the Lean Startup Approach, Live Case Teaching, or Flipped Classroom. He teaches courses at the intersection of entrepreneurship and strategy (e.g., StartupSchool, U-SCHOOL, United Nations Sustainable Living Venture).
Through Design Science (DS), Christoph believes, scholars can contribute to designing a more desirable future. Design Science is rooted in the works of Herbert Simon (e.g., “The Sciences of the Artificial”), and aims at solving real-world problems by drawing on the best available scientific knowledge. Christoph draws on the DS approach to tackle real-world problems in the broader entrepreneurship domain. This includes tackling relevant questions for firms (such as "how to develop a culture that supports the learning from errors and mistakes"), as well as for regulators (e.g., "how to create conditions for an entrepreneurial ecosystem to flourish").
Please reach out to him in case you are interested in co-operating on projects with him.