Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISIProject Manager
Carsten Schwäbe is a project manager in the Competence Center "Policy and Society" at Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI since 2024. He completed a Bachelor's degree in "Politics and Economics" at University of Münster with a stay abroad at the Institut d'Études Politiques d'Aix-en-Provence. He obtained his Master's degree in "Economics" at Freie Universität Berlin. There he obtained his doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) in 2022 at the Chair of Innovation Management under supervision of Prof. Dr. Carsten Dreher. His doctoral thesis, entitled "Governance of Innovation Diffusion", dealt with the selection, design and evaluation of demand-side innovation policy instruments for the market formation and diffusion of renewable energies on the German electricity market. His research focuses on analysing technological innovation systems, the design and implementation of mission-oriented innovation policy and the governance of socio-technical transformations. He has worked on third-party funded projects, for example on the heterogeneous innovation patterns of SMEs and possible innovation policy approaches, on the governance of an EU Knowledge and Innovation Community for the creative and cultural industries or on a study for the EFI on the definition, conception and operationalisation of an agile research and innovation policy. In the "Innovation Policy Orchestra" project, he developed a design process for the definition of objectives and the design of innovation policy instruments based on interviews in ministries and document analyses. He also acquired and managed the research "Mission-oriented policy learning for an agile energy research programme", in which possibilities for implementing mission-oriented designs in the 8th Energy Research Programme of the German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy were discussed.