Congratulations Erik!

It is certainly one of the best parts of my job, that I have the pleasure to work with excellent PhD students. On Friday, 25. of Feb. 2022, Erik Siems (top left) completed his PhD research process by defending his PhD thesis. Congratulatons Erik, very well done.

I would like to express my thanks to the committee members. Morgane Fritz, Excilia Business School, La Rochelle, France and Rodrigo Lozano, University of G?vle, G?vle, Sweden for their excellent report and acting as panel members. Peter Eberl and Stefan Gold from the University of Kassel acted as further panel member. It was a great debate, justifying why this is often called a defense.

Erik published three papers already. One paper focussed on dynamic capabilities in food and automotive supply chains, published in the International Journal of Production Economics and co-authored by Anna Land. It contains a great method contribution, as we show that in a literature review industries as well as time periods can be distinguished. Another paper addresses stakeholder management in biomass supply chains was published in Business Strategy and the Environment (open access). The special story behind this one is that data collection was done in Chile. So, a person speaking Spanish was needed for a third-party-funded project. And well, Erik is fluent in Spanish! Yet, the promise of a highly motived and capabale researcher was already evident. Third, based on supervising two master students, Clara Menke und Malte Hüsemann, the three of them, published a joint papers in Frontiers in Sustainability (open access) continuing the stakeholder management related line of research.

Thanks, Erik, for your great work and contribution to our team!