The House of Innovation (HOI) and the Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology welcomes PhD applicants for the 2020 intake! We research a broad range of topics within entrepreneurship, innovation, and digital innovation and transformation. You will find us to be a young, vibrant, curious, and productive research environment with an extensive international collaboration network and broad and deep connections to industry and society.

Potential topics for new PhDs include, but are not limited to, entrepreneurship and innovation in family businesses, innovation in cancer treatment, entrepreneurial and innovation ecosystems, AI from a social science perspective, and the relationship between innovation, leadership and design. New research initiatives this year: we are looking for PhDs include in particular a study related to a new national innovation hub for cancer treatment, and The Garden – Center for Design and Leadership (see further below).

Apply here for the PhD Program in Business Administration (Dept. of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology).

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Studying the inception, evolution, and results of a vision-driven innovation environment for eliminating cancer as a cause of death

We collaborate with public sector and healthcare organizations in a newly established health innovation environment, which aims to tackle a grand challenge: how to transform cancer from a deadly to a curable or chronic disease. This is our vision-zero and we are convinced that this “impossible” challenge is the right one to tackle, and that the right way to do so is through a multi-actor experimental rather than siloed approach. More specifically, the challenge requires reinvention of the current health ecosystem at both institutional and technological levels. It will involve new forms of public-private collaboration, a fundamental redesign of current roles and responsibilities, as well as extensive digital infrastructures that enable accelerated evidence generation, recombination, and dissemination across the multiple actors in the health service system, including individual citizens. 

The health innovation environment is a national initiative financed by the Swedish Innovation Agency, providing a unique opportunity to study the inception and evolution of these innovation processes in real-time, starting in 2020. Together with SSE, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, AstraZeneca, and Elekta and a wide set of additional actors from the private and public sector are involved, including care service providers, large incumbent pharmaceutical firms, research institutions, health-tech firms, AI-startups, and governmental actors. Anna Essén, Docent, and Magnus Mähring, Professor and Chair of House of Innovation, are leading the critical innovation research that needs to accompany the activities of these actors.

We are recruiting doctoral students to investigate the thorny challenges that will emerge, including questions such as: 

• How can we use data and artificial intelligence to more rapidly develop and apply knowledge about the risk for and prevention of cancer?
• How can we take steps towards new ways of innovating smart health services while building on the strengths of today’s health systems? 
• How will emerging data governance practices shape the design of business models among old and new actors? 
• How will self-learning algorithms enable and constrain control over innovation at the system-level? 
• What forms of governance may work in this kind of distributed innovation environment – that is, who should decide who should get in, get out, and get what? 

Knowledge about these issues is critical in many sectors beyond healthcare, and the results will have global relevance as many sectors are facing pressures to design, govern and scale organizational and digital infrastructures that accelerate innovation in areas tied to grand societal challenges. 

PhD opportunity at the Garden – Center for Design and Leadership

In a world overcrowded by ideas, technologies and features, the key challenge for innovators today is not generating yet another brilliant idea. Instead, it’s about making sense of this abundance, finding new meaningful directions to navigate in this sea of opportunities.

Gamechanging innovations will be those that propose a new, better meaning to individuals, connection to their fundamental needs while adapting to a world that is in constant mutation. The search for new visions and meaning is the job of leaders, therefore today the innovation challenge is very much a leadership challenge!

 Join Roberto Verganti and Mattia Bianchi, professors and curators of the Garden, in doing research about the development of novel leadership models that effectively identify and execute breakthrough innovation opportunities. How can innovative leaders transform products, organizations, and society into a new direction that is more meaningful?

At the Garden, we have a preliminary answer: through design! Far from being only concerned with the look and feel of products, design is ultimately about making sense of things. It's a discipline that, in reflecting about meaning, has developed principles, methods and tools to successfully address the innovation and leadership.

For more details regarding the research project, please contact Prof Mattia Bianchi at mattia.bianchi@hhs.se. For questions about the application process, please contact the admission team at phd.admissions@hhs.se.

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Applications should be sent through the SSE online application portal. Please apply to the PhD Program in Business Administration, specialization Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology. The admission portal is open until February 1, 2020. Notification regarding the results of the selection will be sent out in April 2020. Successful applicants will commence their studies in late August 2020. More information about the SSE PhD Program in Business Administration and the link to the application portal are available under PhD programs on our website.