Prof. Sabine Brunswicker is an internationally recognized scholar with a particular interest in open digital innovation, describing new ways of using information technologies to organize the collective design and use of innovative digital goods. She is a Professor for Digital Innovation, and the Founder and Director of the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Northwestern Kellogg School of Management and at the Northwestern Institute for Complex Systems (NICOs). Until 2016, she was Visiting Professor for Digital Innovation at ESADE Business School. Prior to joining Purdue she was Head of Open Innovation at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart, Germany.
Sabine Brunswicker is a computational social scientist, bridging social science and computing, when studying open digital innovation. Examples of open digital innovation she is particularly interested in are: open source software communities, civic crowdsourcing, open data app competitions, collective software design and re-use, or collective energy conservation through interactive home-energy monitoring applications and visualizations. In her work, she designs and examines systems and technologies that support open digital innovation with respect to their technological and behavioral impact. She also uses computational techniques and behavioral analytics (e.g. advanced network analysis or agent-based modeling) to predict individual as well as collective outcomes in open digital innovation. The Research Center for Open Digital Innovation (RCODI) at Purdue University is the backbone of her work, jointly performed with an interdisciplinary group of researchers. As user-inspired researchers she and her team intensively engage with industry partners, policy makers, and individual citizens through large-scale field studies and increasingly also controlled experiments using ‘virtual’ contests and user studies. For example, Sabine was one of the founders of IMP³rove, a web-based platform to assess innovation capabilities. In 2016, she and her team launched Purdue IronHacks, a unique virtual multi-staged open data competition, in which students and innovators develop novel and useful apps to solve societal challenges.
Sabine holds a Master in Engineering and Management Science (University of Technology, Darmstadt, Germany), a Master of Commerce with a specialization in Marketing and Entrepreneurship (UNSW, Sydney, Australia), and a PhD in Engineering Sciences (University of Stuttgart, Germany).