dr. B. Kump (Barbara)

As an Associate Professor for Business & Sustainability, Barbara Kump sees businesses as one of the crucial actors for more environmentally conscious and regenerative practices and is interested in how businesses can participate in and contribute to a broader societal sustainability transition. She looks at the topic from an organizational and institutional change perspective and studies questions such as why and how established organizations change toward more sustainable practices (or fail to do so), how grassroots innovations (e.g., food or energy cooperatives) can contribute to sustainability transitions, and what the role of individual actors (e.g., managers, employees, researchers) is in organizational change. Barbara coordinates the Organization Theory & and International Entrepreneurship group at the section for Entrepreneurship and Technology Management. 

Barbara is a creative scholar who often goes off the beaten track. She has studied topics such as embodiment in organizational change, the role of psychedelic experiences in sustainable leadership, and how entrepreneurs can turn insects into "food for us" to support the protein transition. She has also coined original concepts, including collective rumination and transition pain to capture novel phenomena. This creativity extends to her approach as an engaged scholar: she has written a piece on the role of intuition in organizational research and once joined a sailing trip to an academic conference, an experience she later turned into a publication that is illustrated with comics. 

Her work has been published, amongst others, in Organization Studies, Human Relations, Organization Theory, Industrial and Corporate Change, and Business Strategy & the Environment. She has received several awards for her research and review activities including the EURAM 2018 Most Inspirational Conference Paper Award from the European Academy of Management.

She holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology (2010) from the University of Graz (Austria) and a habilitation in Business Administration (2022) from Vienna University of Business and Economics (WU Wien, Austria). During her PhD studies, she was a researcher at the Knowledge Management Institute at the Faculty of Informatics at Graz University of Technology (2007–2010). She did her post-doctoral studies at the Knowledge Media Research Institute in Tübingen (Germany) in 2010 and returned to Graz University of Technology to become the leader of the interdisciplinary Knowledge Evolution Group (2011–2012). From 2012 to 2017, she was an endowed professor for organizational learning and organization development at Vienna University of Applied Sciences (Austria), where she carried out applied research in close collaboration with approx. 25 SMEs to increase their dynamic capabilities. Then, from 2017 to 2022, she was an Assistant Professor (and later deputy head of institute) at the Institute for SME Management at WU Wien.

She fully subscribes to the idea of "engaged scholarship" and aims to bring her knowledge to practical application, in particular, to foster sustainability transitions. In doing so, she builds on her skills as a trained consultant and business coach. She is a co-founder of and regular author at the (German) science transfer blog www.wissensdialoge.de and co-author of the book "The green handprint at work: How to be an employee activist for sustainability" (with Babette Brinkmann).

Expertise

• Social Sciences

  • Work Integrated Learning
  • Dynamic Capabilities
  • Organizational Change
  • Field Theory
  • Organizational Research

• Computer Science

  • Learning System
  • Evaluation Result

• Psychology

  • Coping Behavior

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Courses academic year 2026/2027

Courses in the current academic year are added at the moment they are finalised in the Osiris system. Therefore it is possible that the list is not yet complete for the whole academic year.

Courses academic year 2025/2026

Address

University of Twente

Ravelijn (building no. 10), room 2105
Hallenweg 17
7522 NH Enschede
Netherlands

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