Professor Dr. Reinhard Kunz is a Professor of Media and Technology Management. He joined the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne in August 2018.

Research Interests

His research interests are in the fields of Media and Technology Management with a focus on Media Innovation Management. He focuses on various aspects of innovation management and media research with emphases on the media and tech industries, the study of organizational and individual behavior, as well as the management of digital transformations and their impact on customers, enterprises, and the society. In addition to theoretical contributions to a wide array of innovation, media, strategic management, and operations research, his studies aim at deriving implications for enterprises, managers, and also individual well-being.

His research emphases are Business Model Dynamics, Media and Technology User Behavior, Entertainment Science, and Proactive Decision Making.

• Business Model Dynamics combines digital innovation, strategic orientations, and actor engagement with business model innovation/transformation, and path-dependency of legacy news media.
• Media and Technology User Behavior investigates the influencing factors such as usage motivation of new media services adoption and novel media technologies acceptance.
• Entertainment Science researches the motion picture, gaming, sports, and esports industries in terms of home video success factors, financing decisions, user engagement, flow experience, etc.
• Proactive Decision Making highlights the positive effects of proactivity of managers, entrepreneurs, and other decision makers on their life satisfaction and investigates its role in innovation management.

Academic Career

Professor Kunz gained international research experiences at La Trobe University (Australia), Swinburne University of Technology (Australia), and Sacred Heart University (CT/USA). His research results were published, for example, in the European Journal of Operational Research, Technological Forecasting and Social Chance, the Journal of Economic Surveys, and the Journal of Media Business Studies. In 2012, the European Association for Sport Management awarded Professor Kunz with the New Researcher Award. In 2017, his article on “Sport-Related Branded Entertainment” was awarded with the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence.

Before his appointment in Cologne, Professor Kunz worked as a Junior Professor for Media Management, Sport Media at the University of Bayreuth from 2012 to 2017 and as a Professor for Marketing & Sales in the Department of Business & Management at the Management Center Innsbruck (MCI) in Austria from 2017 to 2018.

Reinhard Kunz studied Business Administration at the University of Bayreuth and the Universidade do Porto (Portugal). After his studies, he was a research and teaching assistant at the Chair for Services Management at the University of Bayreuth, where he successfully completed his doctorate in 2012.