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Data fuels decision-making. Banks are well-equipped with the financial data of their customers. Experts often point out that consolidating internal financial data with other data sources (e.g. behavioral data, macro-economic data, etc.) will unfold data’s full potential. Yet, banks’ rich internal data is regularly overlooked as an opportunity that can be used to fuel decision-making. Banks need a solid data-gathering strategy and advanced data analytic skills to leverage their internal data.

How should banks approach internal data?

Data needs to be gathered with a clear purpose. Hence, the journey towards a data-fueled operating model starts with defining clear use cases. Subsequently, the use cases have to be checked against reality. Therefore, banks’ internal data should first be inventoried and categorized. It is crucial to define a timeframe for which data collection is performed (depending on the use case, data collection for the last three to ten years could be most suitable). Subsequently, the data can be put to work through e.g. model-building. While harvesting data with the goal to implement use cases is crucial, the strategy should also entail how to manage data in the future. Harvesting data from legacy architectures demonstrates the potential of data in general but is very inefficient for future endeavors. Here, breaking down data silos and building data lakes represents a robust solution. Currently, banks are still struggling with small projects that only reach the proof of concept stage and large projects that are abandoned due to overwhelming complexity. Incremental progress on mid-complex level projects represents the largest potential to strive.

Too much of a good thing: why data frugality is important

Occam’s razor is the idea that in problem-solving, the simplest solution is usually the right one. This approach is well-adapted in data science for several reasons. Firstly, a model’s appetite for data increases the risk of having unobserved data points which negatively affect the predictive power of a model. Secondly, more data increases the training time for models. More training time means more energy and consequently higher costs. Thirdly, more data can lead to impaired explicability of a model as a complex model’s results are harder to interpret. This is especially the case if deep learning methods are applied (which remain to a large extent black boxes). The low explicability of models prevents their application as part of automated decision-making due to GDPR regulations. Moreover, low explicability could make the model unstable in times of new hitherto unseen data. Users will have difficulties to explain why and with what accuracy the model is adapting to the new circumstances. In general, striving for parsimony is an important criterion for which banks have to optimize when using their data.

Keeping data in the loop

Oftentimes, it is argued that data evolves from simple data to information to knowledge. While that is true for many use cases, it should be pointed out that data-fueled decision-making does not always require intense computation to become knowledge. Depending on the level of human-in-the-loop or the affordances of a decision, very simple data points can be highly informative. However, if data is processed in a time-consuming and complicated manner to derive knowledge (e.g. in form of a report), this knowledge should be kept in the loop. Hence, the results of data processing should become part of the data storage.

– Jonas Röttger, ESR

Disclaimer:
The content of the FINDER blog is not an expression of Commerzbank AG, nor created on behalf of Commerzbank AG. The content is created and contributed by private persons.

On 05.11.2020 we tuned in into the Open Banking Summit held by the Commerzbank in cooperation with the Business Engineering Institute St. Gallen. We will have a look into the Summits key notes to see how the realisation of Open Banking is progressing based on this use case  –  which opportunities may arise and which challenges are still to face.

Open Banking became more prominent in 2016 when the United Kingdom announced its Open Banking Standard and the European Union published its Revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). However, it only gained momentum in 2018 when these drafted legislations came into effect. Simplified these laws require banks to open up their IT infrastructure. Technological this is done through application programming interfaces (APIs) which allow different IT infrastructures to communicate with each other. In the case of Open Banking, APIs enable third parties to connect to banks existing IT infrastructure and thereby access and usage of the data gathered– say bye to data silos guarded by banks.

The backbone of the Summit was a whitepaper The Future of Collaboration in Corporate Banking in which Joerg Hessenmueller (Commerzbank AG) defined

“API [as] a crucial technology that enables communication between IT-systems with enough flexibility to address the complexity of today’s world [based on] closer collaboration among different parties leveraging on their different capabilities to create value for the customer”.

Resulting from that one can draw the conclusion of David Kauer (PostFiannce AG) that

“Open Banking is a fundamental strategic and architectural question. Banks do not just do Open Banking – Open Banking is a framework that requires a 360-degree view of business and corporate clients and their needs. Banks, thus, have to decide wisely about the order of actions they take to follow such an approach.”

So what is achieved so far?

As the use case of Commerzbank depicts cooperation is key to identify and leverage the options available. Slowly, new networks are emerging. First attempts of opening up are made. So far these are still in their infancy. An example is the developer portal. This sandbox provides developers the documentation and option to play around and get used to the APIs provided by the Commerzbank. When having a look at the opportunities and challenges it is, however, clear that this is only a small first step in the right direction.

What are the outstanding opportunities?

The approach envisioned by the PSD2 is to fundamentally change banking in the European Union. Its implementation is aimed to enhance the value proposition of financial organisations. The basic framework is set to achieve a higher degree of cooperation and co-innovation between banks and third parties for example FinTechs. This is highly dependent on the abilities of banks to think beyond their organisational borders. If this outward-opening is happening the most valuable opportunity can be realised:

Building a new digital ecosystem marked by new business models and driven by customer expectations.

Technological enabled would such an ecosystem be through the opening of banks APIs. Cooperation, innovative ideas could facilitate user value by enhancing consumer protection and security of internet payments as well as account access within the EU and EEA. Accordingly, the opportunity for customers is access to enhanced services within one digital ecosystem. Such services would greatly enhance banks attractiveness by increasing their value proposition. At the same time, FinTechs have the opportunity to grow by getting access to a greater market reach or even provide the B2C of banking. Another actor in such an ecosystem would be BigTechs which, according to David Kauer, could take a role as technological orchestrators. In that case banks would probably occupy the B2B in such an B2B2C banking ecosystem. To not be pressured into the role of an anonymous backoffice service provider banks have to seek an pro-active role. So in general Open Banking should not be understood as a threat or zero sum game by banks but instead as an opportunity. In that sense all actors would profit in the banking B2B2C ecosystem.

Which challenges is the industry still facing?

However, the transformation is still facing challenges that need to be tackled for a digital ecosystem to emerge. As the banking sector will open up for everyone offering financial services a mind-set of collaboration is of importance. Customer centricity should be the focus flanked by provisioning of the necessary infrastructure –for example in innovation labs. An optimal setup is completed by a bank’s readiness to identify partnerships and then leverage resources to seize the presented opportunities.

Technological there are still some hurdles that hinder the facilitation of a collaborative approach to adapt to structural change. Technological readiness is one challenge to face. The adaptation of key technologies across the industry differs strongly and may, in the current state, make collaboration more difficult. Tightly connected to this is the missing standardization of APIs. Heterogeneous architectures for the same services are making a fast and approachable cooperation across organisations fairly difficult.

Future will show of all potential actors can overcome these challenges and thus provide the necessary prerequisites to foster an ecosystem marked by innovative ideas combined with industry-specific know-how

–  Jonas Geisen, ESR

Thursday, November 5, 2020 
18:00 CET (UTC + 1) / 09:00 PST (UTC –  7) 
Virtual Workshop on Zoom

This workshop was originally intended to take place during the SMS Special Conference in Berkeley “Designing the Future: Strategy, Technology, and Society in the 4th Industrial Revolution”, which was canceled due to COVID-19. However, as we all learn to adapt to the challenges presented by this health crisis, we are proud to offer you this workshop in a different and virtual format.

We relabeled the title to “Reshaping Firms in Digital Ecosystems: Designing the Future”.

With the rise of digital technologies, new demands and challenges have emerged that require the attention of practitioners and scholars alike. While the world has grown familiar with digital ecosystems as a platform for future growth, little is known still about the ways firms restructure, reshape, and adapt – proactively or reactively – in response to sudden disruption of the emergent digital ecosystems they are part of. The doctoral workshop will have an interactive intent and will also reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on strategy and innovation; how resilient are we when facing a crisis?  

The main objective of the Doctoral Workshop is to foster interaction among leading faculty scholars and doctoral students on various aspects of research and preparing for a professional career in academia. The doctoral student participants will be offered the opportunity to broaden their academic network with senior faculty from around the world and develop a better understanding of the particularities of the academic career. 

Leading researchers in the field brought their experience into the discussion to further develop participants’ insight into the key themes of this conference.

Participants will be able to pitch theirresearch, practicing to anticipate, critically reflect and nuance your contribution as part of the academic debate. The intent is to strengthen and effectively position your research (e.g. the research question, the importance of the research gap, theoretical reasoning, and selection of target journals). Throughout the workshop, they get a chance to present your work and engage in a constructive dialogue with senior faculty and peers.

Banks are often described as possessing a huge pile of customer data but being unable or unwilling to leverage it. We confronted five industry experts with this statement asking what is hindering banks to monetize their rich data reservoirs? Here are their answers and recommendations on how banks could overcome them. 

 IT legacy – banks’ IT systems are not in shape to allow state-of-the-art data analytics

An often described hurdle to leverage data is the IT legacy system of incumbent banks. While the mere size of the data banks own could be a rich resource, the IT systems are not (yet) consolidated data pools that can provide information. Even in collaboration with fintech companies that developed efficient algorithms to perform smart data inquiry, implementation often fails after a successful proof-of-concept stage. The data is not structured and stored in ways that allow for relevant and timely data consultation. So, where to start?

The unique data of banks are spending data. An expert recommendation is to stratify spending data according to customer demographics for a time horizon of the past five years. Some experts recommended that effective and efficient usage of data would only be possible if banks were building new systems from scratch and migrate carefully selected data (e.g. the last five years) subsequently.

Talent turnover – culture and demands are not attractive for young high potential IT workforce

Banks’ IT systems display opportunities for young and ambitious IT workers: they are embedded in huge and well-paying organizations and require plenty of work. While banks communicate externally that they are particularly looking for IT employees with a disruptive mindset the reality is often very different: a highly regulated and risk-aversive culture is skeptical of incrementally built and improved IT solutions. No IT system is released flawlessly today. Systems are optimized, catered towards customer needs, or improved in terms of security standards while they are already in the market. Banks expect a bullet-proof solution from the get-go. In addition, banks are not particularly interested in functionality that does not yet have a clear use case.  Industry expertise is needed in combination with data analytics skills to develop promising use cases that appeal to strategy-setting executives. This represents a key to stretch banks’ risk-averse culture and provide young IT employees with interesting challenges.

Value chain positioning – highly-regulated back-end vaults vs. life-fulfillment platforms

Big tech companies are entering the financial services market. While companies like Apple and Google are partially interested in gathering access to spending data via financial products, their main interest is to extend their portfolio by yet another revenue stream. However, because of their data analytics skills and their business model, tech companies can offer a level of convenience and pricing (e.g. freemium) banks are unable to provide. The question is whether banks are willing to play the role of highly regulated institutions that manage the back-end of financial services while tech companies will own the customer relationships?

Tech companies are increasingly becoming targets of supervising and regulatory bodies (especially in Europe) and it is at least unclear whether they are motivated to become as regulated as banks. This represents a competitive advantage for banks that are very familiar to strive in the regulated environment.

Moreover, if banks do want to act proactively defending their customer relationships, data analytics are necessary to design platforms that offer financial services that go beyond today’s banking products. A banking platform should provide internal, external, and integrated financial services that facilitate everyday life (e.g. buying public transportation tickets) or rare life-changing financial decisions (e.g. buying own property). The challenge is that not every bank can turn into a platform, given that platform economics usually represent natural oligopolies.

Data monetization can be direct or indirect – which path to chose?

Direct data monetization refers to trade data in exchange for value, whereas indirect data monetization refers to using data to enable, improve, or maintain revenue streams (without trading data itself). While trading data could be lucrative for banks on a short- to midterm scale, it could also jeopardize their reputation as highly entrusted institutions. Hence, pursuing indirect data monetization by using customer data to design tailor-made solutions seems to be the golden route. However, for services and solutions to be highly relevant in content and timing, banks still have a long way to go.

by Jonas Röttger, FINDER ESR

Reshaping Firms in Digital Ecosystems: Designing the future

We’re organizing the following upcoming SMS Berkeley workshop this fall, titled: Reshaping Firms in Digital Ecosystems: Designing the future

Call for interested doctoral students:

The main objectives of this – now virtual – Doctoral Workshop, focusing on strategy and innovation in a digital era, are to foster interaction among leading faculty scholars and doctoral students on various aspects of research and on preparing for a professional career in academia. Theme: Reshaping Firms in Digital Ecosystems: Designing the future.

Date: November 5^th, 2020. registration open now: click here!

Mike Schavemaker, Innovation Transformation Lead and senior innovation consultant at Royal Philips, and member of the FINDER Advisory Board, and Barbara Voelkl, FINDER PhD, share their thoughts on the current pressures incumbent banks are subject to in the context of business model innovation.

Disclaimer:
The content of the FINDER blog is not an expression of Royal Philips, nor created on behalf of Royal Philips. The content is created and contributed by private persons.

As a Russian proverb goes: “Still water undermines the bank”. Now put in a drastically new – and current – context and perspective, banks find themselves more urged to actively take position what financial services they want to explore, own or divest. Based upon our interviews with Investment Capital players, Tech players and Brick-and-Mortar banks we present 5 commonly found problems that pressure banks to recalibrate their purpose and venture inroads to Fintech and Tech in general.

Incumbent banks are currently pressured with 5 developments:

1. Negative Interest Rates

With negative to close-to-zero interest rates particularly in Europe and in the United States, the traditional revenue model is heavily challenged. If interest does not provide any income any more, outcome-based revenue models are on their forefront. Collaborations with Tech and FinTech companies find their chance here: They provide back-end solutions and fee-based opportunities to gain revenue, provide the infrastructure to lock in customers and achieve a high wallet share and automate processes for a higher customer loyalty and satisfaction.

2. Covid-19

With the banking ecosystem was in a cautious transition towards more digital servicing, it is still heavily focused on brick-and-mortar business. With Covid-19 resulting in lockdowns and social distancing while financial services from lending to savings become immensely important in financially instable times, the banking business is pressured to accelerate their digital and online services while adhering security and privacy standards.

3. Changing Customer Behavior

While naturally the digital native generation is applying a comprehensive digital orientation also into the financial service ecosystem, it is necessary to take a differentiated view rather than assuming a general “demand for digital” from a consumer perspective. For (i) small repetitive interactions – getting some cash, checking your balances – a strong appreciation for digital applications is seen. For (ii) once-in-a-lifetime events such as a housing mortgage, even digital natives seem to appreciate a trust-based relation with an actual human interaction. Taking a differentiated approach is thus necessary to gain wallet share.

4. Changing Employee Expectations

While young and experienced innovators are working at big tech players or founding their own FinTech, the organizational culture at incumbent bank is not per se attractive for the workforce needed to disrupt the business. With internal start-up spaces, separate task forces and a modernization of organizational behavior, banks need to start inspiring their workforce to stay relevant and attract human capital.

5. Legacy Technology

For a huge part, and interconnected to the aforementioned lack of skills, banks are sitting on legacy technology. Often built on monolithic architecture, banking technologies and infrastructure needs to be carefully but greatly revised – under honest consideration of in-house skills and cooperation with Tech and FinTech.

Having laid out the pressures on banks, we need to be cognizant that not all banks are alike. At the least, we need to distinguish Retail banks offering financial services to the general public from Commercial Banks supporting businesses with financial issues. But as another Russian proverb goes: “Who owns the bank owns the fish”.

In this proverbial perspective we have had several acknowledgements by our interviewed peers that Retail banking would likely be first to be impacted by the tech player’s ambition to ‘own the wallet share of the customer’ and have conversely the most prominent intrinsic motivation for overcoming the mentioned pressures. However, there is a tension here between their most precious strategic assets, i.e. trust and brand equity and the ability to create big-bang approach digital branches. Despite the reality of the pressures you see few digital branches being opened by the brick-and-mortar retail banks to channel the pressures to learning environments, like the traditional Sparkassenverband had done, creating its digital daughter Deutsche Kreditbank AG. On contrary, brick-and-mortar banks are exploring in reality very diligently their role and roadmaps evolving towards full digital players, in effect because they want to understand – beyond trust and brand equity – what other strategic assets they can develop to capture the value, churning into additional retention or sustained relevancy. Our observation is that this very dilemma similarly faced by product-based companies who want to provide digital services on-top of their product offering: you don’t know what services add value up-front, which will potentially alienate your existing customer base and what services do matter; let alone for which services you can additionally charge for.

Commercial banks in their turn are more opting for hybrid collaboration models with tech players, particularly in the B2B-domain. In this context, the tech players leverage their manufactured products like assets for their client-base, offering a suite of managed services beyond the standards of a typical financial lease. Often bundling the product-sell with extended services, leveraging the commercial bank’s bespoke infrastructure and capabilities beyond a typical operational lease. There they are tapping primarily into the changing customer behavior, being able to offer adjacent offerings, leveraged by fintech and exploited with tech. Of course, we can make additional cross-sections throughout the Commercial Banking domain, however we believe that Commercial Banks and Tech players have much more natural power leverage to create sustainable alliances, channeling the pressures upon them; simply because if they get the partnership right, they both profit from the increased wallet-share.

We will not ‘boil the ocean’ by discussing more types of Banks, simply as in these blogs we would like to provoke thoughts and trigger insights. We welcome you to provide your views in directly contacting us or leave your views in the LinkedIn message boxes. For now, I would like to thank Barbara Völkl for co-creating these blogs. I will surely miss her editing skills, our weekly synchronizations and the interviews we held with interesting peers thus far: all best with next (ad)ventures, keep on Innovating and always stay open for new perspectives from where ever they may come!

• 40 hours per week
• Maximum gross monthly salary: € 3,061
• Nijmegen School of Management
• Required background: Research University Degree
• Duration of the contract: 4 years
• Application deadline extended to: 8 August 2020

Click here to apply

We are looking for

FINDER 

The FINDER programme, a research collaboration between Radboud University and Atos, sets out to Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era (FINDER). You will investigate the innovative collaborative arrangement amongst organisations – grassroots, incumbents and the wider society – as they inclusively explore digital technology for new product or market development. The keywords defining the programme are digital transformation, collaboration, strategic reorientation and value creation to society at large.

The FINDER research scope spans industries and job functions, requiring candidates to synthesise complex information and to approach problems nimbly in a manner that can be transferred to both academics and practitioners. It demands a sophisticated understanding of the context in which business is done, the effect of technology in driving these collaborative processes and of the stakeholders involved. FINDER’s integrated curriculum prepares students to drive change at the vanguard of business and technology by challenging them to consider multiple perspectives and to create innovative solutions to problems that are not only profitable to business but also relevant and responsible towards society at large.

We are currently looking for an intellectually curious candidate, aspiring to gain a doctorate in the discipline of Management – FINDER workstream #3: ‘Alternative business models in digital ecosystems’:

In good times and bad, firms regularly reshape themselves. Firms may re-align organisation structure with strategy and changed external circumstances (Puranam & Gulati 2009), intervene to stimulate specific activities (Okhuysen and Eisenhardt 2002; Aalbers, 2019), or downsize during challenging times (Dougherty & Bowman 1995). Even under such challenging circumstances, entrepreneurship continues to take place. Intra-entrepreneurs often have to build organisations in order to perform activities for which markets are not yet ready, or even are the first to render solutions to navigate out of crisis. Accordingly, entrepreneurs and managers must consider the design of business models and even building businesses to execute transactions which cannot yet be performed in the market. While reshaping firms (e.g. changing structure or size) is both important and frequent, it is also relatively understudied. Moreover, extant research (e.g. on downsizing and turnaround) typically focuses on traditional outcomes (e.g. profits) with less emphasis on such things as collaboration, knowledge creation and innovation at the individual or team levels. The study of business models at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship research involves an exploration of how firms do business at the system-level under such challenging conditions. These are conditions typically to be expected, also in the wake of COVID-19, with economic prospects scaling down substantially across various industries. Such interdisciplinary investigations are essential for understanding how firms may re-align organisation structure with strategy under suddenly changing external circumstances, with the implications of digital transformation potentially helping different emergent ecosystem actors to outperform in this new landscape. Europe’s financial services industry presents an example of this type of dynamics, facing both technology-driven as well as institutionally-driven challenges in re-inventing and exploring alternative business models as well as entering into economically uncertain times as economic crisis looms on the horizon.

This quantitatively oriented research project investigates the following research question: What are the characteristics of alternative business models in digital ecosystems? Which factors facilitate their development as firms reshape themselves in the face of sudden crisis? This project brings together research on antecedents, processes and consequences associated with organisational reshaping and consider the role of technology as enabler or constraint in this process. The project outline allows for the combination of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches targeting single or multiple organisational levels. The project has good access to the European financial services industry and the fintech community in particular as inroads to original data collection and industry exposure, as well as access to the major academic business data repositories (Icon, Crunchbase, Lexus Nexus, etc.).

For this project you will counselled by and report to your supervisory team lead by Dr Rick (H.L.) Aalbers, Associate Professor of Strategy and Innovation at Radboud University | Institute for Management Research| Centre For Organization Restructuring

As a Marie Curie FINDER PhD Fellow you will (amongst other things) be responsible for delivering prescribed project objectives on time and within budget. You will be collaborating with other researchers at the Institute for Management Research (IMR) at Radboud University and Atos Europe. You will communicate and provide information to academic and industrial supervisors, and regularly attend formal supervisory meetings. While placed at Atos, you will be conducting doctoral research in order to support a dedicated impact case. You will also be expected to attend and prepare reports for regular meetings with other members of the FINDER team, and to report progress, agree future work and exchange data/experience.

We ask

• A (research) Master’s degree, preferably with a business administration background.
• You must be available for a starting date as soon as possible, 1 October 2020 at the latest.
• You must meet the Marie Sklodowska-Curie EID programme eligibility requirements: at the time of recruitment, researchers must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in the Netherlands for more than 1 year in the 3 years immediately prior to the reference date.
• Evidence of independent research skills.
• Experience in empirical research.
• Demonstrable ability to work independently, to prioritize tasks, manage time and meet deadlines.
• Proactive and self-organising.
• Willingness to relocate.
• Strong interpersonal skills.
• High motivation to perform rigorous academic research and collaborate with industry.
• Excellent communication skills, including a high standard of written and spoken English.
• Willingness to work flexibly where necessary to fulfil the needs of the research project, including international travel and completing the industrial placement.

Desirable: 

• Affinity with the Financial Services and/or FinTech sector and the turnaround and restructuring theme.
• Affinity with new technology and forms of collaboration as technology and new business model drivers.
• Knowledge of R (statistics program) or other advanced statistical modelling programs; or advanced qualitative research methods.

We are

Radboud University (RU) in Nijmegen is one of the largest Dutch universities, acclaimed for the quality of teaching and research. RU has seven faculties (including the Nijmegen School of Management) and enrols over 19,899 students. It was internationally ranked 156th by the QS World University Rankings and occupies a prominent position in Europe. RU is currently successfully coordinating 114 European Commission Research projects and 41 H2020 projects, ten of which are MC ITN projects.

The Nijmegen School of Management (NSM) is a leading academic centre of research and higher education, focusing on institutional and managerial issues within complex organisations.

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 120,000 employees in 73 countries and an annual revenue of €13 billion. European number one in cloud, cybersecurity and high-performance computing, the group provides end-to-end orchestrated hybrid cloud, big data, business applications and digital workplace solutions through its Digital Transformation Factory, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across all business sectors.

Radboud University

We want to get the best out of science, others and ourselves. Why? Because this is what the world around us desperately needs. Leading research and education make an indispensable contribution to a healthy, free world with equal opportunities for all. This is what unites the more than 22,000 students and 5,000 employees at Radboud University. And this requires even more talent, collaboration and lifelong learning. You have a part to play!

We offer

• Employment: 40 hours per week.
• The gross starting salary amounts to €2,395 per month, and will increase to €3,061 in the fourth year (salary scale P).
• In addition to the salary: an 8% holiday allowance and an 8.3% end-of-year bonus.
• Duration of the contract: as a FINDER Marie Curie PhD Fellow you will be appointed for an initial period of 18 months, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, the contract will be extended by 2.5 years.
• The intended start date is as soon as possible, 1 October 2020 at the latest.
• Generous benefits from the Marie Curie programme apply for the first three years (including relocation and extended conference funding facilities and travel allowance), after which, in the fourth year, standard Dutch university job-ranking system (UFO) conditions will apply.
• Training and research on the intersection of academia and business.
• Generous travel allowances for conference and research purposes.
• You will be able to make use of our Dual Career Service: our Dual Career Officer will assist with family-related support, such as child care, and help your partner prepare for the local labour market and with finding an occupation.
• Are you interested in our excellent employment conditions?

Would you like more information?

For more information about this vacancy, please contact:
Linda Buis, Project Management Officer FINDER – Marie Curie Initial Training Networks (ITN) 
Email: r.buis@fm.ru.nl
Applications only via this link.

Apply directly

Please address your application to Linda Buis and submit it, using the application button on the Radboud University site, (here), no later than 8 August 2020, 23:59 Amsterdam Time Zone.   

Your application should include the following attachments:

• Letter of motivation.
• CV.
• Part of your Master’s thesis.
• A two-page essay reflecting on the research question, showcasing your view on potential future research directions and (academic) relevance.

Review of applications will start immediately and will continue until the position is filled. Interviews will be set up digitally and will take place with a selection of the FINDER Selection and Evaluation Team (academic and/or business side of the team). Expect 2 to 4 interviews to be part of the selection procedure. 

You will be asked to give a presentation as part of the selection procedure. This presentation will provide us with a better feel for your interest and potential. The presentation must be based on the aforementioned two-page essay, reflecting on the research question and showcasing your view on potential future research directions and (academic) relevance, and should be included in your application.

As the pandemic continues to challenge even the most basic aspects of our everyday life, it’s common to see projects in corporate, academic, and government spaces among many others being majorly disrupted. The association for PhD candidates in The Netherlands, PNN, has discussed at length how the pandemic has ground various PhD projects around the country to a halt.

Luckily, and in no small part due to the already digital nature of the FINDER project’s operations, the project’s fate has not been jeopardized to such a drastic extent. This, of course, does not mean that the pandemic is a faraway concern: it and the threats it presents are very near and have even affected the lives of members of the FINDER team. That said, it’s worth taking stock of what the future of the FINDER project’s research entails at this time.

As has been previously discussed here, the Strategic Management Conference has been cancelled. Additionally, the European Group for Organizational Studies’ Hamburg Colloquium, to which one PhD was slated to go and present his research, has been cancelled (and replaced with a virtual one). While these events are a pity, they also come with a silver lining: the chance to uninterruptedly continue the in-house refining of the PhDs’ research projects (virtually) alongside their Atos and Voleo counterparts as well as to closely monitor their responses as data.

As has been somewhat alluded to here, the switch to a completely digital way of working means a more intense exchange of data between stakeholders and research subjects. The FINDERS are consistently attending strategy meetings with their coaches and informants in the field in order to capture what is turning out to be a bountiful field of research opportunity. This has involved, for example, seeing how clients reorient their strategies and demands for digital infrastructure, as well as seeing how Atos as a firm that provides such is handling the changing landscape of client demands. As more and more companies prepare for a long-term remote operations scenario, additionally observing how these infrastructures move from contingency-to-permanent states will likely elicit interesting conclusions.

This, in short, has shown that researching the phenomena within the project’s scope remotely is not only feasible but, in certain circumstances, preferable. There is, of course, no substitute for shaking hands and making observations physically in the field, but it goes without saying that neither of those opportunities will be an option in the foreseeable future, even if European society is slowly trying to stagger back into normalcy.

What, then, does this look like? From the quantitative angle, not much changes: data files still transfer digitally, and while operations have generally slowed down as different organizations find their footing, the agility with which the FINDERS and their Atos and Voleo counterparts have navigated new norms means that data collection has suffered minimal delays. From the qualitative angle, interviews and “field observations” have been ongoing in digital conference rooms, via email, and the like. While these come with new challenges, they also alleviate old ones. For example, digital conference calls make accounting for who’s saying what when much easier, as in-person meetings tend to move quickly and chaotically when thinking minds reach synergistic levels.

Of course, the pandemic, while tragic, has also exposed the world to new research opportunities, as we have never before seen how highly digital societies deal with wide-scale, debilitating events such as this. Where that goes and whether or not it becomes core to the project’s outputs remains to be determined, but naturally, the pandemic will make its way to some extent into many if not most or even all FINDER publications, which will add weight to what will very likely be a boom in COVID-related research publications in the coming months and years.

– S. James Ellis, ESR

Vacancy: Marie Curie PhD Fellowship (1x) in Strategic Management – focused on Fintech Networks
European Commission funded – Fixed term for 4 years

FINDER PROJECT

FINDER, a competitive Marie Curie Research and Training Program funded by the European Committee stands for: Fostering Innovation Networks in a Digital Era.

The FINDER program sets out to Foster Innovation Networks in a Digital Era (FINDER). Appointed Marie Curie FINDER PhD Fellows will investigate the innovative collaborative arrangement amongst organizations – grassroots, incumbents and the wider society – as they inclusively explore digital technology for new product or market development. Unique features of this European Industrial Doctorate are: an in-depth investigation of innovation dynamics at emergent ecosystems and complex organizations;  industry-led complementary training in the domains of Professional Innovation Management; a bespoke program of FINDER network events that bring together doctoral researchers, academics, practicing managers and policymakers interested in innovation and a total of 18 months placement at one of Atos’ European business hubs (Frankfurt / Madrid). The research and training program is driven by a collaboration of Radboud University and Atos, teaming up in this trajectory over a period of four years.

FINDER accommodates five high caliber and full-time PhD positions, facilitating first-class PhD and in-company training at the crossroads of Fintech academia and business. Recently a vacancy has become available. For this purpose we are looking for an intellectually curious candidate who aspires to gain a doctorate in the discipline of Management.

Vacancy: 1 Marie Curie PhD Fellowship in Strategic Management – focused on Fintech (1.0 FTE)
FINDER PROJECT, workstream #3: ‘Alternative business models in digital ecosystems’. More information can be found here.

In good times and bad, firms regularly reshape themselves. Firms may re-align organization structure with strategy and changed external circumstances (Puranam & Gulati 2009), intervene to stimulate specific activities (Okhuysen and Eisenhardt 2002; Aalbers, 2019), or downsize during challenging times (Dougherty & Bowman 1995). Also under such challenging circumstances entrepreneurship takes place. Intra/entrepreneurs often have to build organisations in order to perform activities for which markets are not yet ready, or even are the first to render solutions to navigate out of crisis. Accordingly, entrepreneurs and managers must consider the design of business models and even to building businesses to execute transactions which cannot yet be performed in the market. While reshaping firms (e.g., changing structure or size) is both important and frequent, it is also relatively understudied. Moreover, extant research (e.g., on downsizing and turnaround) typically focuses on traditional outcomes (e.g., profits) with less emphasis on such things as collaboration, knowledge creation and innovation at the individual or team levels. The study of business models at the intersection of strategy and entrepreneurship research involves an exploration of how firms do business at the system-level under such challenging conditions. Conditions typical to be expected also in the wake of COVID with economic prospects scaling down substantially across various industries.  Such inter-disciplinary investigations are essential for understanding how firms may re-align organization structure with strategy under suddenly changing external circumstances, with the implications of digital transformation potentially helping different emergent ecosystem actors to outperform in this new landscape. Europe’s financial services industry presents an example of these sort of dynamics, facing both technology-driven as well as institutionally-driven challenges in re-inventing and exploring alternative business models as well as entering into economically uncertain times as economic crisis looms on the horizon.

Therefore, this quantitatively oriented research project investigates the following research question: What are the characteristics of alternative business models in digital ecosystems? Which factors facilitate their development as firms reshape themselves in the face of sudden crisis? This project brings together research on antecedents, processes and consequences associated with organizational reshaping and consider the role of technology as enabler or constraint in this process.  The project outline allows for the combination of diverse theoretical and methodological approaches targeting single or multiple organizational levels. The project has good access to the European financial services industry and the fintech community in particular as inroads to original data collection and industry exposure as well as access to the major academic business data repositories (Icon, Crunchbase, Lexus Nexus, etc.).

As a Marie Curie FINDER PhD Fellow you will be responsible for:

• Delivering prescribed project objectives on time and within budget.
• Collaborating with other researchers at the Institute for Management Research (IMR) at Radboud University and Atos Europe.
• Communicating and providing information to academic and industrial supervisors including regular attendance at formal supervisory meetings.
• Conducting doctoral research while being placed at Atos, in order to support a dedicated impact case.
• Attending and preparing reports for regular meetings with other members of the FINDER team, to report progress, agree future work and exchange data/experience.

Marie Curie PhD Fellowship:

Please note that this MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE scheme is funded by the European Commission who has set specific eligibility criteria for this vacancy. The primary objective of the EID program is international mobility (i.e. move from one country to another) and this is a requirement for the Marie Curie PhD Fellow when taking up the appointment. At the time of recruitment by the Radboud University (NL), the candidate must not have resided or carried out their main activity (work, studies, etc.) in The Netherlands for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to her/his recruitment under the project. The Fellow should be within four years of the start of their research career at the time of taking up the position. For details on the Marie Curie Fellowship ITN program please click here.

IMR:

Successful candidates will also be required to complete an application for and be accepted on the PhD program at Radboud University – Institute for Management Research. Applications from women, who are currently under-represented in this area, will be particularly welcome; however, the final recruitment decision will be based solely on merit.  For details on the Radboud IMR Centre for organization

Work environment: Radboud University (RU) in Nijmegen is one of the largest Dutch universities acclaimed for the quality of teaching and research. RU has seven faculties (including the Nijmegen School of Management) and enrols over 19,899 students. It was internationally ranked 156th by the QS World University Rankings and occupies a prominent position in Europe. RU is currently successfully coordinating 114 European Commission Research projects and 41 H2020 projects, ten of which are MC ITN projects.
The Nijmegen School of Management (NSM) is a leading academic centre of research and higher education, focusing on institutional and managerial issues within complex organisations.

Atos is a global leader in digital transformation with 120,000 employees in 73 countries and annual revenue of € 13 billion. European number one in Cloud, Cybersecurity and High-Performance Computing, the Group provides end-to-end Orchestrated Hybrid Cloud, Big Data, Business Applications and Digital Workplace solutions through its Digital Transformation Factory, as well as transactional services through Worldline, the European leader in the payment industry. With its cutting-edge technologies and industry knowledge, Atos supports the digital transformation of its clients across all business sectors. The Group is the Worldwide Information Technology Partner for the Olympic & Paralympic Games and operates under the brands Atos, Atos Syntel, Unify and Worldline. Atos is listed on the CAC40 Paris stock index.

Benefits:

• employment: 1.0 FTE
• the gross starting salary amounts to €2,325 per month based on full-time employment, and will increase to €2,972 in the fourth year (P scale)
• in addition to the salary: an 8% holiday allowance and an 8.3% end-of-year bonus
• as a FINDER Marie Curie PhD Fellow you will be appointed for an initial period of 18 months, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, the contract will be extended by 2.5 years
• you will be classified as a PhD Candidate in the Dutch university job-ranking system (UFO)
• generous benefits from the Marie Curie apply for the first three years (including relocation and extended conference funding facilities and a travel allowance), after which, in the fourth year, standard Dutch university job-ranking system (UFO) conditions will apply
• training and research on the intersection of academia and business
• generous travel allowances for conference and research purposes.
• you will be able to make use of our Dual Career Service where our Dual Career Officer will assist with family related support, such as child care, and help your partner prepare for the local labour market and with finding an occupation.

Requirements:

• hold a (Research) Master’s degree with a business or economics backgorund.
• be available for a starting date as soon as possible, per October 1st, 2020 at the latest;
• You should meet the Marie Sklodowska-Curie EID program eligibility requirements; :
  • The primary objective of the EID program is international mobility;
  •  At the time of recruitment by the Radboud University, the candidate must not have resided or carried out their main activity in The Netherlands for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to recruitment under the project;
  • The Fellow should be an Early Stage Researcher: within four years of the start of their research career;
• evidence of independent research skills;
• experience in empirical research;
• willingness to combine both academic work and practitioner oriented activities (e.g. whitepaper drafting) in collaboration with a selection of the business FINDER partners (Atos, TQ, Voleo)
• demonstrable ability to work independently, to prioritize tasks, manage time and meet deadlines;
• proactive and self-organizing in the spirit of joint project delivery;
• willingness to relocate (Frankfurt / Madrid);
• strong interpersonal skills;
• high motivation to perform rigorous academic research and collaborate with industry;
• excellent communication skills, including a high standard of written and spoken English;
• willingness to work flexibly where necessary to fulfil the needs of the research project, including international travel and completing the industrial placement.

Desirable:

• affinity with the Financial Services and/or FinTech sector and the turnaround and restructuring theme;
• affinity with new technology and forms of collaboration as technology and new business model drivers;
• knowledge of R (statistics program) or other advanced statistical modelling programs; or advanced qualitative research methods.

Application and selection process:

• Application deadline: July 10^th, 2020
• Your application is only to be submitted via the “apply” button on the Radboud website and follow instructions. Click here for the vacancy.
• Your application should include and be limited to the following attachments:
  • Letter of motivation;
  • CV;
  • Part of your Master’s thesis;
  • a two page essay reflecting on the above research question showcasing your view on potential future research directions and (academic) relevance.
• Interviews will be set up digitally and will take place with a selection of the FINDER Selection and Evaluation Team (academic and/or business side of the team).
• You will be asked to give a presentation as part of the selection procedure. This presentation provides us with a better feel for your interest and potential. The presentation will be based on your submitted 2 pager.

Informal enquiries: Project Management Office FINDER, Ms Linda Buis: r.buis@fm.ru.nl

No commercial propositions please