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Innovation and Intellectual Property Management (IIPM) Laboratory

We are very pleased to announced that the Wikipedia page about Ove Granstrand has now been published. Ove has been and continues to be an inspiration to so many students and researchers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ove_Granstrand

Prof. Tietze says "Ove has been the inspiration for me to initially consider PhD studies, which I had never thought off before. I well remember attending his office hours after one of his lectures when I was a master's student in the Management of Production programme at Chalmers in 2002. This was when I asked him what might now appear as quite a naive question 'What does it take to do a PhD?'. He appeared slightly surprised by that question, but responded promptly. After a quick reflection he said one word 'curiosity'. I knew that's for me. I had always been accused of being overly curious by friends and parents. The rest is history."

Following the graduation from his master studies, Ove Granstrand recruited Frank as a research assistant on the PEX research project ("Patent and innovations for growth and welfare”) for the Swedish Government. After completion of that project, Frank returned to Hamburg, where he started his PhD studies at Hamburg University of Technology in 2005 supervised by Cornelius Herstatt, but remaining in close contact with Ove. Throughout his PhD studies he visited Gothenburg frequently, even being invited to use Ove's writing retreat, their private summer house on Orust, a beautiful island off the coast north of Gothenburg, where he spent two weeks in the summer of 2009. Prof. Tietze says "I vividly remember the many visits to Gothenburg during that period. Every time I would go for a few days and would be hugely impressed by Ove's immense knowledge. Every evening I went to bed tired by the intense but inspiring discussions we had typically lasting several hours in their home in Moelndahl."

Ove Granstrand and Cornelius Herstatt, who knew each other as both were involved in the European Instituted for Technology and Innovation Management (EITIM), then jointly co-author the foreword for Prof. Tietze's book "Technology Market Transactions", which was published in 2012. Visits to Gothenburg continued over the past 20+ years and Ove Granstrand became a mentor for Prof. Tietze. In 2019, Ove Granstrand was then appointed the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor to the IfM. During the four months he spent in Cambridge throughout two visiting periods (a third visit needed to be cancelled due to the pandemic), Ove engaged with several IfM colleagues, PhD students of the IIPM lab, enriched seminars with thoughtful comments and gave two highly inspiring Leverhulme Trust lectures. 

News & Blog articles

Newspaper article

2 June 2025

A short opinion piece by Prof. Tietze was featured in the Brussels Morning Newspaper calling for more innovation within our IPR systems to address global challenges: https://brusselsmorning.com/we-need-strong-intellectual-property-rights-for-a-sustainable-future/73186/

Thought piece: Has Innovation Broken Western Culture? Reflections on Contemporary Western Culture and Possible Innovative Ways Forward

20 May 2025

By Frank Tietze (2025) Western culture today is profoundly shaped by ongoing waves of innovation, a concept close to my heart and to which I have dedicated many years of my professional research and teaching career. Technological innovation particularly has transformed daily life, created jobs, and helped build tech...

New paper published on the Geopolitics of Battery Technologies

20 May 2025

Together with colleagues from the Department of Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Muenster, the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Battery Cell Production (FFB) and the Helmholtz Institute Muenster (IMD-4) we have published the results of a patent study investigating the geostrategic race for leadership in...