Tobias Kretschmer has joined Imperial Business School as Professor of Strategy, Technology & Organisation at the Department of Management & Entrepreneurship. With a research career spanning global leading institutions, his work examines how technology and organisation design interact to drive competitive advantage in the digital economy. 

Professor Kretschmer’s research focuses on platform markets and the digital transformation of firms, investigating how technology reshapes strategic decision-making, value creation, and organisational performance. His recent work explores how increasingly large and influential complementors are challenging long-held assumptions about dominance in digital ecosystems. 

Professor Kretschmer also contributes to the field through several editorial and leadership roles, serving as Senior Editor at Strategy Science, Vice Chair of the Organization Design Community, and as part of the leadership team for the Academy of Management’s Technology & Innovation Management Division. He was Panel Chair for the European Research Council’s SH1 Starting Grants in 2024 and is currently a Research Fellow in Organisational Economics at the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London. 

How technology reshapes competition and collaboration 

Across his research portfolio, Professor Kretschmer combines theory and empirical evidence to explore how digital change impacts organisations and markets. In his paper “Anonymity and Peer Feedback in Crowdsourcing”, he studies how anonymity affects the quality and tone of feedback in digital collaboration environments, offering insights into the design of more effective crowdsourcing systems.  

In “First-Party Complements in Platform Markets: The Role of Competition”, he investigates how platform owners decide whether to release their own complementary products, uncovering strategic patterns that depend on the intensity of user and complementor competition. 

His paper “Protected but Punished?”, examines how whistleblower protection laws influence wage dynamics—revealing that while stronger protections enhance transparency, they can also trigger unintended wage adjustments within firms. 

Other recent journal publications include analyses of news aggregators and media competition, game wikis and community-driven innovation (both Strategic Management Journal), and the impact of GDPR on data-driven business models (Marketing Science). 

His research has been published in Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, American Economic Review and Information Systems Research.  

Prior to joining Imperial, he was Professor of Strategy, Technology & Organisation at LMU Munich School of Management, where he led the Institute for Strategy, Technology & Organisation. He holds a PhD in Economics from London Business School and an MSc in Strategy from the University of St. Gallen. Professor Kretschmer has also held full-time positions at London School of Economics and Political Science and INSEAD, and visiting positions at Bocconi University, University College London and NOVA School of Business & Economics. 

Discussing his move to Imperial, Professor Kretschmer said: “I’ve been studying new technologies for my entire career. Being at Imperial gives me a chance to learn in depth how these technologies work and to understand the strategic implications of technological change (and vice versa).” 

At Imperial, he looks forward to deepening cross-disciplinary collaboration. He is eager to work with scholars in strategy, technology and data science to better understand how firms can navigate digital disruption and design organisations that thrive in it.