IKE’s overall research approach is based on the understanding of economic growth and change as knowledge driven, and knowledge creation and innovations as reflecting processes of interactive learning within systemic frameworks. IKE’s main research focus is on industrial dynamics. This focus includes industrial transformation over time and across regions, including regional innovation systems, cluster and industry analysis, labor market dynamics and entrepreneurship. It further includes technological changes and issues related to innovation, sustainability, and green transition. IKE’s ambition is to remain an acknowledged contributor to the industrial dynamics research community and to continuously push the research frontiers of the field.

The IKE group has a long tradition of interaction with researchers at leading universities from all over the world. IKE finds it crucial to be an active part of the international academic community – it raises quality, builds networks and creates possibilities for collaboration and funding. Every year several scholars visit the IKE group for shorter or longer research stays and members of the IKE group are often visit foreign universities.

The IKE group is involved in a wide range of activities with researchers at other Danish and international universities, such as research papers, teaching, research projects and organization of conferences and workshops. IKE and scholars from Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and University of Southern Denmark (SDU) are core partners in the Danish Research Unit of Industrial Dynamics (DRUID), which organizes two major conferences: the leading European PhD conference in management and innovation that attracts students from Europe and beyond as well as the leading academic conference in innovation and industrial dynamics.

IKE’s overall research approach is based on the understanding of economic growth and change as knowledge driven, and knowledge creation and innovations as reflecting processes of interactive learning within systemic frameworks. IKE’s main research focus is on industrial dynamics. This focus includes industrial transformation over time and across regions, including regional innovation systems, cluster and industry analysis, labor market dynamics and entrepreneurship. It further includes technological changes and issues related to innovation, sustainability, and green transition.

The analyses can be carried out on different levels of aggregation. The research group’s focus is on understanding firm level behavior, general patterns, and relations among firms, as well as policy implications of these. Accordingly, the research addresses specific sectors, groups of firms and more general issues like the evolution of industry structures, innovation activities, technological change, and entrepreneurship. Interactions between actors at and between different levels of aggregation - organizational, regional, national, international - are regarded as fundamental driving forces in the creation, implementation, and diffusion of new technologies, knowledge, organizational structures, and innovation. With a point of departure in an innovation systems understanding, such processes of change are understood as bounded and facilitated by formal and informal institutional contexts.

The research is based on diverse research methods, spanning from quantitative methods on register, survey, and patent data as well as different types of novel data sources, to various qualitative methods; also emphasizing the interplay between qualitative and quantitative methods and data. There is an emerging focus on novel computational methods such as NLP, machine learning and AI. Research disciplines include among others innovation and entrepreneurship studies, regional studies, organization and management studies, labor economics, and research methods.

The members of IKE aim at making substantial contributions to current and future teaching in industrial dynamics, innovation, entrepreneurship, and related fields at AAUBS in general, as well as contribute to the teaching in basic and core disciplines in economics, business economics and (primarily quantitative) research methods. The members are present at both the bachelor, master and executive programs offered by Aalborg University Business School as well as at other departments at Aalborg University.

The members of IKE are also active in PhD training by supervising PhD students, teaching PhD courses at Aalborg University and elsewhere, developing the PhD programs at Aalborg University Business School, and participating in European wide networks for PhD training. The latter includes contributing to the organization of and participating in the DRUID Academy for PhD students in Economics and Management of Innovation, Technology and Organizations.

Usually, there are between three and five PhD students actively present in the IKE Group. These are typically linked to research projects funded by external grants and link to researchers in international research environments, affiliated with the IKE group. PhD students are expected to take active part in numerous research activities, partake in organizing and carrying research and social activities in the group, as well as present their work at internal seminars. In light with the overall approach of the IKE group the research methodologies used by IKE PhD students span quantitative as well as qualitative approaches. Since the activities of the IKE group are strongly internationally oriented, there is a tradition for PhD students to present and publish their work in English.

The below programmes are the educational programmes where IKE researchers most often teach. All study programmes follow the principles of project organised group work and problem­based learning that characterises the entire Aalborg University.

Bachelor's degree programmes

• Economics
• Economics and Business Administration (HA)

Master's degree programmes

• Economics
• Economics and Business Administration:
• Business Data Science
• Innovation Management
• Entrepreneurial Engineering
• Social Data Science
• Innovation and Societal Challenges

Part time programmes (AAU Executive)

• Graduate Certificate in Business Administration (HD1)

• Master of Business Administration (MBA)