Prof. Dr. Christoph Seckler is an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurial Strategy at ESCP Business School in Berlin. He holds the Chair of Entrepreneurial Strategy and he is Academic Director of U-SCHOOL. In 2021 he has been recognized to be among the "Top 40 Under 40" by the German magazine Capital. 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; one idea at a time. For him, entrepreneurship goes beyond starting a startup. It means to develop 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.
In his research, he is interested in understanding the dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems, and learning from failure. Previous research on these topics has been published in leading international journals such journals as Academy of Management Discoveries, Journal of Management Studies, and Accounting, Organizations and Society, and Long Range Planning. His research has received multiple international awards at the Academy of Management Conference (AoM), and the European Academy of Management Conference (EURAM). In a current large scale research project, he explores the dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems in major European cities (e.g., Berlin, Paris, London, Madrid, etc.).
In his teaching, Christoph's ambition is to empower people to make a difference. He believes that this requires an educational approach which 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"). In case you are interested in co-operating on such projects, please reach out to him.