Presentation of the lead educator

Hey, my name is Wiebke Reim, and I’m associated senior lecturer at entrepreneurship and innovation at the Luleå University of Technology. I’m working both with research and teaching. My research is mainly focusing on business models and doing my PhD studies, I mainly focused on business model for product service system or also called Servitization. And that basically means that a company that uses only the products now also sells their products, services or together with services. And since my I defended my PhD in 2018, I also work with business models that are more focused on digitalization.

That is because a lot of companies see themselves forced to introduce more digital technologies and of course, also to create value with this digital technologies and in order to really make a difference and create value for the customer, you, of course, need to have the competence for providing these new types of services or applications. But of course, in the end, you also want to make sure that you actually earn some money with this. And therefore, it’s extremely important to really adapt your business model to this new digital technologies and the new types of value you can create.

And we also have a specific focus on looking into the business ecosystem that you need to create to make this possible, because with like new digital technology, you often have to interact with new partners, for example, for data collection or data analysis. And it is extremely important to have a good relationship with these partners and to really work together. And I also look into the business model for the circular economy. They can also be called circular business models. And here the focus is really on that you simultaneously in it create value for the economically like earning money, but that you also create value for the environment and for the society.

And this all simultaneously with the same idea of having like circular flows and reused and reduced waste in your processes. And all my research has been published in quite good journals and has also got quite good attention from other researchers and they have cited that work. And and that is, of course, really good to see. But I’m most proud of when actually the companies that we work together with, when they really implement our findings and really change their businesses based on the work that we do together with them. And as I said, I also do quite a lot of teaching. And the teaching is focused on, for example, innovation, management, leadership or strategic management.

But I also do quite some teaching on and entrepreneurship and business planning. And in this type of courses, we really focus on developing new business ideas and try to start or work with new companies, new startups, and to see how we can develop these ideas into businesses that really could work and have a good outcome. And I also supervise master’s thesis, and now I will also be a teacher for a mooc. And that is really exciting. And I really hope that the ideas from this course will really help you developing your businesses or the businesses that you are working at.