Dietmar Harhoff

Since 2007, Dietmar Harhoff has been chairman of the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation, that has been appointed by the Federal Government of Germany. Dietmar is director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and head of the department Munich Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research (MCIER). He is Honorary Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich (LMU) and Academic Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at the LMU. From 1998 to 2013 he was professor of business administration at the LMU and chaired the Institute for Innovation Research, Technology Management and Entrepreneurship (INNO-tec). After his training as a graduate engineer in mechanical engineering at the University of Dortmund, he first worked as a research engineer in the UK and Germany. After that he finished a master degree as McCloy scholar at Harvard University, followed by a doctoral degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). From January 2010 to September 2010 he was Visiting Professor at Stanford University in the U.S. As a scientific adviser he is working for a number of public and private organizations, among others he is a member of the Standing Advisory Committee (SACEPO) of the European Patent Office (EPO) and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board at the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi). In 2007, Prof. Harhoff was nominated by Managing Intellectual Property Magazine to be one of the 50 most influential people in the field of Intellectual Property.