The VU Amsterdam Center for Strategizing & Organizing Innovation is dedicated to groundbreaking research and advice on how companies and other organizations can structurally boost their innovation performance and become world-class innovators. Our mission is to provide businesses, their leaders, and the academic community with key insights how to make innovation into a structural success, instead of aiming for incidental hits.

The Center is one of the larger academic groups worldwide with a focus on consulting and professional service firms (PSF). In our teaching we prepare students for a role as junior consultants with a broad and open mind. In our research we focus on the roles and responsibility of professions in our society, and aim to better understand the challenges they and their clients face, be it digitalization, work pressures, diversity, or sustainable innovations.

The VU Center for Diversity and Inclusion in Organizations brings together academics, practitioners, policy makers and other stakeholders to engage in research and find solutions to complex gender and diversity challenges facing organisations. Besides taking a stand, and doing what is right, research continues to show that inclusive organisations outperform organisations in which this topic is taken for granted.

The VU Center for Business & Society aspires to advance research on the role of business in society, driven by the broader question of how businesses are managed, led and organized in order to ensure social and ecological sustainability and contribute to the greater good. The Center is devoted to interdisciplinary, collaborative and impactful research and be recognized as a global thought leader in research on sustainable business practices in and around organizations, markets and society at large.

VU Center for Enterprise Family Research studies enterprises at the family level and aims to be a platform of expertise on how to best prepare the rising generation (siblings or cousins who inherit family assets) to be responsible enterprise owners and figure out for themselves which role they want to play in the oversight and management of the enterprise family. As a research platform, the Center offers opportunities for research and executive collaboration between scholars and practitioners.

The VU Center for Ecosystems is a center of expertise, which aims to be platform for research, education, and valorization. Propagating cross-disciplinary and multi-level research into the emergence, governance, and transformation of ecosystem organizing the center organizes research colloquia (e.g. mini-conferences) to advance a research community on ecosystems. Furthermore, the center will disseminate the results of its an annual ecosystem survey assessing state-of-the-art ecosystem practices.

The VU Center for Boards and Executive Leadership Development aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of factors influencing the decision-making of boards, including board members and CEO characteristics, behavioural patterns, governance structures and regulatory requirements. With a mission to create knowledge that can help top management teams to develop and to better lead contemporary organisations, we aim to explore the interplay of multiple factors that shape the performance of boards and top executives within the boards.

The VU Center for Feedback Culture is a center of expertise that aims to be a platform for research to examine how feedback culture can be cultivated in organizations in different fields and across different countries. The Center offers opportunities for research and executive education collaborations between scholars and practitioners who are interested in the topic. Specifically, the Center aims to bring researchers and practitioners together by organizing sessions where practices and insights can be shared.

The SERVUS originated from an active group of researchers and practitioners at amongst others the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Greenleaf Centre Europe, THTConsulting, VUMedical Centre and VU School of Business and Economics. At a meta level, we see the main reason for SERVUS’ existence: to meet the needs of future generations of leaders to be effective in diverse (business) environments, through the development of a robust new paradigm of servant- leadership in research and education.

ADRIBA is a platform for the scientific deepening, broadening and dissemination of behavioral analysis and Organizational Behavior Management (OBM), the science of behavioral change in organisations. Performance, or performance, is central to ADRIBA. The starting point is a performance issue within an organization. We see improving performance best through the principle of shaping. In other words: a step better every time. Measurable.

Research in the Strategic Management group is diverse but united by a common desire to understand and explain organizational phenomena in the context of global competition. Our research ethos reflects an appreciation for multiple form of inquiry and we bring together expertise in quantitative and qualitative methodologies, ranging from on-site field-work and in-depth participant observation to experimental studies in laboratory settings. We study organizations and their strategies applying a multifaceted toolkit of theories, such as contingency theory, the resource-based view, institutional theory, and identity theory.

The Organizational Theory group broadly addresses the processes in which individuals, and groups, and corporate structures interact and how these processes influence and are influenced by their contexts. In particular, we focus on organizational transformation from multiple perspectives and using a multi-disciplinary approach.

The purpose of the VU Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management (HRM) research group is to create knowledge that can enable organisations to understand and proactively manage the current realignments and shifts in employment practices, technology, demography, and organisational structures. Our research is organized in five core themes: careers and meaningful work, the future of work design, leadership and organisational change, talent management, and diversity management and inclusion.

VU activities in the field of entrepreneurship are bundled in the Center of Entrepreneurship at VU (CfE@VU). Nevertheless, the VU activities in the field of entrepreneurship are spread all over the university, even literally over the whole VU campus. Some examples are the famous courses in entrepreneurship for science students and for human movement students. The research activities are often joint efforts by international and Multidisciplinary teams.

The Ethics, Governance and Society (EGS) department is known for research and teaching on ethical dilemmas and implications of a broad range of global governance themes. EGS is a Multidisciplinary group of scholars focusing on governance and ethics issues related to decision making in organizations, institutions, markets and society. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines in the social sciences, Health and humanities, and a wide range of methods (including philosophical and formal logic and mathematical modelling), EGS develops theoretical and formal frameworks that provide insights into social dynamics and their ethical and governance aspects.

The KIN Center for Digital Innovation researches the development and use of digital innovations in organizations. Our interdisciplinary group of 35 researchers offers state-of-the-art expertise in the broad field of digital innovation; from the development of smart technologies in ecosystems to changing working methods under the influence of AI, from crowdsourcing via online platforms to the changing role of the IT organization. Typical to KIN is its ‘embedded research’: research in close collaboration with industry partners.

Research efforts are aimed at analyzing data-driven decision-making problems arising in industry and society, in particular related to Logistics and Supply Chain Management, Sustainability and Networks. By examining the mathematical structure and properties of these decision-making problems and by developing novel data analysis and optimization methods, the Department offers academic and practical insights on how to tackle contemporary challenges.

The Department of Spatial Economics offers insights and applications in urban, regional, transport and environmental challenges from a primarily economic perspective, often enriched through multi-disciplinary collaborations. The 60 staff members are involved in both fundamental research as well as in national and international commissioned research. With this research, the department has gained national and international recognition, as shown by the large number of international publications and citations.

The research is characterized by a strong emphasis on relevance for business and society, and is centred around social marketing (e.g., health, sustainability, public policy). These topics are investigated from different perspectives, often bridging the three sub disciplines, for instance by applying behavioural theories to strategic issues or by combining experimental data with modelling approaches. In recent years, the Department has invested highly in its research program.

The Finance department at VU Amsterdam is a solid and growing department within the School of Business and Economics. With more than 30 faculty members the department of finance conducts world-leading research in major fields of finance. Members of our department have received prestigious research and teaching awards and publish regularly in all major finance and economics journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics.