Research Overview

The Chair of Organization and Management, headed by Gilbert Probst, focuses on four primary research areas: organizational growth, ambidextrous organizations, public-private partnerships, and learning organizations.

In order to intensify the research regarding organizational growth, the Center of Organizational Excellence (CORE) has been created. The CORE is a self-sustaining structure in close collaboration with University of St. Gallen the and the University of Geneva. The aim of this research center is to analyze the main requirements for sustainable corporate growth and performance. Its current research centers around three fields of interest: sustainable corporate growth, effective corporate structures, and preventing corporate crisis.

The second research area, ambidextrous organizations, focuses on helping organizations with the simultaneously balancing of exploitative activities (daily business) and explorative tasks (innovations). While the former activities strive to optimize an organization's efficiency, the latter ones seek to innovate. The question companies are faced with in this matter is how to reconcile such contradictory activities within one company.

Third, Prof. Probst is interested in studying public-private partnerships from an organizational perspectives. Indeed, partnerships between the public, business, and at times civil society sectors to tackle deep-rooted societal challenges are often referred to as the "collaboration paradigm of the 21st century." In this regard, the Geneva Pubic-Private Partnership Center has been created in March 2013.

The fourth and last primary research area concentrates on shedding more light on knowledge management and learning organizations. In this context, the Geneva Knowledge Forum (GKF) has been founded. It aims at rendering the knowledge of firms, often intacit, tacit in order to help the firm become a learning organization. However, once the knowledge is tacit, companies need to manage and diffuse it in order to profit from its value add.

All research projects are carried out in close collaboration with industry partners from the public and private sector. This allows not only for a continuous knowledge exchange but also for a constant dialogue. The Chair of Organization and Management sees itself as a platform for exchanging and sharing knowledge between academia and industry.