Chair / Junior Professorship for
Entrepreneurial Strategy / Say Institute

Junior Professor Dr. Christoph Seckler, Owner of the Chair Entrepreneurial Strategy, Berlin campus, ESCP

- Junior Professor Dr. Christoph Seckler

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
— Samuel Beckett

At the Chair of Entrepreneurial Strategy, we believe that entrepreneurship can be a force for good in society; one idea at a time. For us, 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). We foster entrepreneurship through all of our activities in research, education, and consulting. If you want to join our team, or cooperate with us, please do not hesitate to contact us.

- Prof. Dr. Christoph Seckler

Jean-Baptiste Say Institute

The Jean-Baptiste Say Institute for Entrepreneurship relies on a unique European network which was developed in 2007 by the Entrepreneurship Chair of ESCP and has today more than 50 researchers and teachers. Its goal is to train entrepreneurs and leaders around the world in entrepreneurship and, to prepare tomorrow’s managers for profound changes in the world of work.

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Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship

At the DS:E, we believe that design science enables entrepreneurship scholars to combine cutting-edge research with real world impact. We enable entrepreneurship scholars to engage in design science research in three ways. First, we bring together design science experts from different disciplines to further develop the design science research paradigm for the entrepreneurship field. Second, we educate interested entrepreneurship scholars in doing high impact design science research . Third, we serve as a platform to match firms’ entrepreneurial practice challenges with design science scholars.

Website

Teaching
Research
Publications
Team & Contact

Teaching
We offer the following courses:

MBA in
International Management

Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Go to the programme

MSc in
Strategy and Digital Business

StartupSchool
Hackathon

Go to the programme

PhD
Programme Berlin

Publication Seminar
Qualitative Research Methods

U-SCHOOL:
Developing Entrepreneurial Leaders to Make Transformation Happen

Research

Research approach

Our research converges around the question of how to leverage adversity. This means we are interested in how individuals, teams, and organizations can overcome and benefit from challenging situations. We study, 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. We are excited that previous research has received multiple international awards, for example, three "Best PaperAwards" at the Academy of Management.

Research topics

Learning from Failure

A topic that has attracted considerable attention in both theory and practice is: learning from failure. While learning from failure is widely considered a crucial learning mechanism for entrepreneurs, questions on who, when, why, what and how entrepreneurs learn from failure is of much debate. We contribute to these discussions by studying the learning from failure of individual entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial teams, as well as entrepreneurial organizations. We believe that properly understanding the phenomenon will help to eventually improve how entrepreneurs learn from failure, and thus promote successful entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

A much used metaphor in media, practice, and academia is the one of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. While the metaphor seems to resonate with a lot of people, some fundamental questions need to be answered in the future. These questions include: what is actually an entrepreneurial ecosystem, how can we best study entrepreneurial ecosystems, and how can we design entrepreneurial ecosystems to be successful. We aim to contribute to these discussions by providing a realist (re-)conceptualization of what constitutes an entrepreneurial ecosystem, by empirically examining the entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe, and by theorizing about their functioning. Based on these insights, we aim at developing ideas on how to design prosperous entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe.

Design Science

Design science presents the entrepreneurship field with a promise. The promise is that entrepreneurship scholars can be at the vanguard of generating new knowledge, not only to report on ‘what is’ but to develop knowledge on how things ‘should be’. We engage in design science research to tackle some of the world's most pressing issues. Beyond doing design science research on pressing issues, we also work on developing the conceptual foundations of the design science approach.

Research Awards

2020: Finalist for OMT´s Louis Pondy Best Dissertation Paper Award - Academy of Management, USA
2019: Runner-up for Best Paper Award - G-Forum, Germany
2018: Best Paper Award - Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
2017: Scholarly Achievement Award - Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
2017: Best Paper Award (Management Consulting Division) - Academy of Management, USA
2017: Thomson South-Western Outstanding Research-Based Paper on Management Consulting - Academy of Management, USA
2013: Nominated for Carolin Dexter Award - Academy of Management, USA
2013: Information Age Publishing Award: Outstanding Doctoral Student Paper, Academy of Management, USA
2012: Scholarly Achievement Award - Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany
2012: Best Paper Award - Second Runner-up - European Academy of Management (EURAM)

Focus on:
Last Publications

Journal Article

SECKLER, C., S. FISCHER, K. ROSING (2021) Who Adopts an Error Management Orientation? Discovering the Role of Humility ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT DISCOVERIES

Journal Article

HABERSANG S., J. KUEBERLING-JOST, M. REIHLEN, C. SECKLER (2019)
A Process Perspective on Organizational Failure JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES, 56(1), 19-56

Journal Article

SECKLER, C., U.GRONEWOLD, M.REIHLEN (2017) An error management perspective on audit quality
ACCOUNTING, ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIETY, 62, 21-42

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Publications
Find an overview

Leading successful transformation: How to design a corporate transformation portfolio

ESCP Impact Papers, 2024-20-EN

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Team and contact

Junior Professor Dr. Christoph Seckler

Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurial Strategy

+49 30 32007 233

cseckler@escpeurope.eu