Georg Wacker

Born and raised in Munich (Germany), Georg obtained his high-school diploma (Swiss Matura and German Abitur) after a four-year stay at a boarding school in the Swiss Alps. After gaining his B.Sc. in mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, he gathered hands-on experience as assistant to the VP Corporate Engineering in a major food processing company in the United States. Thereafter, Georg obtained his M.Sc. in mechanical engineering, again at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 2009. At present, he is pursuing a non-consecutive M.A. program in corporate management and economics at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany.

Brought up in a family business environment and member of the sixth generation of a German construction equipment company, Georg has been involved in the field of family business research since his childhood. For the past nine years, he has been a member in the board of trustees of the EQUA foundation whose mission is to facilitate research and education in the field of family businesses. This is also the area of interest of his current study. For his master thesis at Zeppelin University’s chair for Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (Prof. R. Prügl) at the Friedrichshafen Institute for Family Businesses he is going to use Sawtooth’s ACA software.

Besides his academic and professional interest in family businesses, technology, management, environment, politics, and economy, Georg is a passionate skier and snowboarder, which is mainly due to the four-year stay in the Swiss Alps. Furthermore, he enjoys playing tennis, traveling and exploring foreign cultures.

His Research

The research project is concerned with the individual weighting of decision factors for investment decisions in the R&D sector. Differences between decision makers of family and non-family businesses as well as interdependencies with personal and organizational attributes, such as tenure or entrepreneurial orientation, are hypothesized and will be analyzed.

The decision factors whose importance the ACA will determine are derived via a pre-study identifying the relevant influences for R&D investment decisions among German companies. The subsequent study will be carried out via an online survey distributed among (mostly) German companies. The survey will consist of validated scales, measuring theoretical constructs as well as the adaptive conjoint analysis determining the factor importance and some personal and demographic questions.