New head of the Schumpeter Center

Prof. Dr Uwe Cantner has been elected as the new Managing Director of the Schumpeter Center at the University of Jena. He replaces Prof. Dr Andreas Freytag in this office, who is stepping down from the Center's Board of Directors after six years at the helm.

Cantner is Professor of Microeconomics, Vice-President for Early Career Researchers and Diversity Management at the University of Jena and Chair of the Federal Government's Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation. He was President of the "International Schumpeter Society" from 2012 to 2014 and initiated the establishment of the Schumpeter Center at the University of Jena in 2018. His main research interest is innovation economics, i.e. questions about the sources, characteristics and effects of new ideas in the economy and in society.

Dynamics of change through technological and social innovations

The Schumpeter Center for Research on Socio-Economic Change (JSEC) at the University of Jena is a cross-faculty institution in which researchers from the social and behavioural sciences, law and economics work together. The centre focuses on the drastic dynamics of change at a societal level, which are triggered by technological and social innovations, the entry of emerging and developing countries into the global economic division of labour, but also by migration movements, the ageing of society or the tension between deregulation and regulation processes.

The JSEC is named after the Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883–1950). Entrepreneurship and innovation play a central role in his theories on economic development.