Position at IIB, other positions and academic career

Jan Schmitt is a postdoctoral researcher and works as the operational project leader for the “Headquarters in Austria” (HiA) research project. Before joining WU, he was an assistant professor at Amsterdam Business School in the Netherlands. He received his PhD degree from WU Vienna in 2021. His dissertation focused on the emerging phenomenon of cross-border relocations of headquarters and was awarded the “Stephan Koren Best Dissertation Award 2022”, recognizing the best dissertations at WU Vienna. Additionally, Jan received the “Danubius Young Scientist Award 2022”, the “Best Doctoral Dissertation Proposal 2021” of the Academy of International Business (AIB), and was a finalist for the “IM Division D’Amore-McKim School of Business, Northeastern University Dissertation Award 2022” of the Academy of Management (AOM). Throughout his academic career, Jan has held visiting positions at the University of Michigan (USA) and at Aalto University (Finland).

He is a CEMS graduate from WU Vienna and University of Sydney. Before that, he had completed a dual study program and obtained his Bachelor’s degree in International Business Administration from Hochschule Ludwigshafen. As part of his Bachelor’s degree, Jan had joined BASF for three years and worked in a variety of business areas both in Germany and Chile. During his Master’s studies, he completed two consulting internships with A.T. Kearney as well as Horváth & Partners and did several consulting projects for multinational corporations as part of his studies.

Research interest

In his research, Jan studies the changing role of headquarters (HQs) in multinational corporations using unique quantitative longitudinal datasets, rich qualitative longitudinal case studies, and novel survey data. In particular, he investigates how current trends around HQ dispersion, disaggregation, and digitalization impact HQs’ functions, location choices, and coordination mechanisms. His work has been published in leading international journals, including Journal of World Business, Journal of Organization Design, and Business Horizons. Additionally, he has published a variety of practitioner-oriented reports and co-edited a book. His research has been recognized with multiple awards and nominations at leading international conferences, including the “Best Paper in International Corporate Governance Award 2022” from the Academy of Management (AOM) and the “Copenhagen Business School Prize 2024” from the European International Business Academy (EIBA).