Prof. Dr. Alexander Pöschl
Professor of Entrepreneurship at University of Applied Sciences Saarbrücken (HTW Saar)
I specialise in entrepreneurship (start-ups, family businesses and their succession) as well as M&A and buy-ins.
Selected career milestones
2011 to 2017
Head of Corporate Development at Conrad Electronic SE as well as authorised signatory and commercial manager within the Auto-Teile Unger Group (ATU), where I was responsible for the rubber compounding and recycling division “Estato” with 100 employees and a turnover of around 35 million euros. Restructuring of Estato with first growth in four years and preparation of Estato for takeover by the Mobivia Group (with ATU).
2017/18-2020
Co-founder of digitalbetrieben GmbH, specialised in digitisation projects and training as well as data science. Among other things, initiated the joint venture with Grundig Academy for Germany-wide “Digital Tool Labs” events. Our start-up was taken over by the IT and innovation consultancy bewegewas Holding GmbH in 2020. Afterwards I became a minority shareholder at bewegewas.
2020
Search, structuring and negotiation of the partial sale of Pöschl Catering GmbH, a medium-sized catering company with around 80 employees. The company was founded in 1978 and is now a family-external, second-generation company.
2021 to date
Advisor for bewegewas on its sale to Conrad Electronic SE. Professor of Entrepreneurship at HTW Saar since the beginning of 2022. Lectures include corporate management and entrepreneurship, start-up and succession management or valuation. Iniitiated the cooperation between HTW and Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) in Malaysia. Research project on entrepreneurship-through-acquisition, funded by Montan-Stiftung-Saar, among others.
Research
My empirical research focuses on entrepreneurial change in start-ups and small and medium-sized (family) enterprises. The most recent peer-reviewed studies I have published address the following topics, among others:
- The strategic change in distressed start-ups (“Entrepreneurial decision-making logics during time-critical pivoting: empirical evidence from high-tech ventures“, published in early 2022 in the International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing).
- The influence of the succession process in family businesses on their digitalisation (“The impact of family-external business succession on digitalization: exploring management buy-ins“, published in 2020 in the International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management, together with Prof. Dr. Jörg Freiling from the University of Bremen).
- The entrepreneurial orientation of transferors and successors during management buy-ins (MBI) in family businesses (“Family-external business succession: the case of management buy-ins“, published in 2020 in the Journal of Small Business & Entrepreneurship, together with Prof. Freiling).
- The entrepreneurial behaviour of members of decentralised, autonomous organizations (“Longitudinal evidence of entrepreneurial behaviour in a blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organization: Case study of the Nano cryptocurrency“, published in 2023 in Entrepreneurial Business and Economics Review).
- More on ResearchGate.