Part-time PhD programme

Why did you choose the RSM part-time PhD program?

I chose the RSM part-time PhD program because I want to be part of the RSM mission to be a force for positive change in the world having an impact in society through business research.

The RSM part-time PhD program is a great opportunity to combine my executive activity with top notch research abilities, the program is designed to suit the agenda of active executives. The quality and support of all the professors, of the supervisory team and the program coordinators inspires and effectively guides the PhD process.

What do you like about the program?

I like how the RSM part-time PhD program has challenged my skills and views. This program gives me a structured approach to top quality research and reignites my understanding of management. I specially enjoy the lectures and conversations with the RSM faculty, a community of highly rated academics that open the black box of scientific research philosophy and tools in an inspiring and enthusiastic way.  I am proud to be part of this program and willing to create knowledge combining my decades of real business experience with the wisdom of the global research community that is now available for executives through this unique program.

I applied to RSM’s part-time PhD program because of its winning combination of academic rigor and professional emphasis. As one of the top European institutions for progressive management research, RSM has poured its longstanding experience with academics into a part-time PhD program that gives professionals the knowledge and tools needed for rigorous academic research. For instance, the program systematically guides students to produce and publish high-quality academic articles. Because part-time PhD students typically work at the heart of pressing managerial challenges, RSM’s program is also designed to provide enough flexibility to accommodate the part-time schedule of professionals. Taken together, this makes for a rigorous and flexible program that leads to a sustained and effective learning experience for professionals!

I commend that RSM’s part-time PhD program accounts for the individual needs of students (e.g., schedules, topics, supervisors), and that the program provides a structure in form of “modules” intended to support the student in producing high quality academic work.

I researched and compared a fair bit across the different programs available for working professionals globally before submitting my application. What I liked a lot about RSM/Erasmus University was a clear focus on high-quality research. There are probably easier paths to a doctorate. But if one wants to learn how to conduct best-in-class academic research, this is the right place. I have not seen any other University that offers a part-time PhD program with the same rigor, especially in my area (Finance).

What do you like about the program?

Three things really: First, I very much liked the many courses and seminars on research methods during the first 18 months of the program that were taught by senior faculty members. They helped me to gain a good understanding of the techniques required to do academic research. Second, and most importantly, I am most thankful to work with my two supervisors, Peter and Thomas. They have excellent research experience and expertise. Their work is being published in the very top academic journals in Finance and Management. For me, as a novel researcher, this is an excellent opportunity to learn from the best. Lastly, I am very thankful for having met my fellow PhD candidate friends in the cohort. They are a diverse, smart and global group of people I can learn from.

I was aware of the RSM reputation for the quality of faculty and the high standard of research. I wanted to be exposed to, and stretched to the higher level of academic curiosity, while keeping in sight practical application of my research. Additionally, I liked a very organized and structured approach to lectures, as well as opportunity to be part of the cohort with other students.

My advisors are experts in their fields, who have given me an invaluable guidance, support and questioning that is keeping me even more motivated to continue with my research. I enjoy the camaraderie of the participant in the part-time PhD program, not just from our cohort, but also other cohorts, to mix fun with a forum to talk about research.

The RSM program introduces professionals and business leaders to the world of academic rigor and guides them through the exhilarating processes that accompany a PhD. During this journey, the diverse group of ambitious and experienced fellow part-time PhD-candidates offer moral support and camaraderie.

Why did you choose the RSM part-time PhD program?

Having finished my MSc many years ago, I like the solid foundation of the first one and a half years. During the first one and a half years, the courses were a good refresher. The workload also prepared me for the hard work that comes after that.

What do you like about the program?

I enjoy the contact with my fellow cohort members. They understand what it is like to be in a Ph.D. trajectory, and they are great sparring partners. I also like that it is possible to take additional courses that contribute to my projects, apart from the mandatory program. More plusses are my advisors, the facilities, and the campus.

Financial scandals around the world have harshly shown the importance of transparency and reliability in performance reporting systems. Companies that fail to clearly communicate externally with investors on their investments, financial position, and financial performance likely face increased difficulty accessing external financing or an increased cost of financing. Companies that do not report, evaluate and compensate performance transparently and equitably internally, can create detrimental organizational cultures and can stimulate managers to behave opportunistically by managing earnings, by gaming the performance measurement system and by acting myopically.

Accounting is the research discipline that examines the role of accounting information in companies´ communications, both externally and internally. Top and middle managers, as well as outside providers of financing such as banks and equity investors, use accounting information for decision making and control purposes.

The objective of this Ph.D. project is to identify and analyze innovative research questions in the area of accounting. The project can apply to the subfields of managerial and/or financial accounting (incl. auditing), or on the intersection thereof, depending on research interests and goals, and skills and preference of the candidate. This research project has a strong potential to influence companies’ external and/or internal communication policies and/or accounting and incentive systems, as well as influence regulatory policies and/or accounting institutions.

We live in a highly connected world that is filled with digital technologies, social media, mobile devices, Internet-of-Things, smart cities, and connected cars. Growth of the information technologies has created new opportunities across different industries as companies innovate to meet changes in consumer demand, and has given rise to new challenges. In our Ph.D. program in Information Systems, you will be trained to conduct innovative research to address increasingly complex challenges facing digital society.

We are seeking highly motivated working individuals with demonstrated academic ability, that are committed to interdisciplinary research on significant information technology and management issues, and who desire to pursue a PhD research in this field. As a Ph.D. student, you will gain the training and experience necessary to conduct independent research. You will work closely with the advisors to define, develop, and execute your own research.

You will have the opportunity to collaborate with our faculty members. They are working on a wide-range of interdisciplinary research topics, broadly categorized in three sub-domains: Digital Strategy, Business Analytics, and Energy Informatics. More specifically, the faculty members are interested in supervising the following topics including:

• Digital transformation
• Digital platforms
• Digital marketing and recommendation
• Crowd sourcing and crowd funding
• User generated content
• Mobile advertising
• Digital markets and auctions
• Digital privacy
• Social networks
• Ethics of AI
• AI and decision making
• Energy markets and smart grid
• Smart cities

Acting on unprecedented change

Traditionally, management research takes the perspective of business and focuses on how conditions for business can be improved. Research conducted by the members of the Department of Business-Society Management starts with the challenges that society and our natural environment face and focuses on how business, in partnership with other actors and organizations, can address these challenges. In other words, we help business to take responsibility for the context in which it operates. This is important because our social and natural environments are changing in unprecedented ways. Business contributes to some of these developments, such as climate change, growing inequality, global displacement and also alienation from the general public by losing track of the interests of broader society. Yet, society also changes in ways that are difficult to foresee for companies and other organizational actors alike.

The research conducted by the members of the value based organizing program focuses on a variety of topics—all directly relevant to business acting upon unprecedented change. A common theme underlying all of this research is that it seriously considers the possibility that the way companies do business—including how they relate to the context in which they operate—needs to be changed fundamentally and that small gestures are unlikely to be sufficient to help.

Topics include alternative definitions of and approaches to business, including issues around climate change, corporate communication, sense-making processes in the context of sustainability, business ethics, philanthropy, new business-society strategies, alternative organization forms such as social enterprises and partnerships, alternative governance regimes such as commons, and aligning corporate value propositions with societal issues and social innovation in times of grand challenges and wicked problems. Due to the diversity in research topics, the research methods we use vary widely, from qualitative techniques to survey and laboratory research.

The mission of finance research is to enhance our understanding of financial decision-making by firms and managers, the actions of participants in financial markets, as well as the functioning of financial markets and intermediaries. 

We are a vibrant and diverse group consisting of leading international researchers. Our faculty undertakes world-class research that is both of high societal relevance and meets high methodological standards. A list of recent publications by our finance faculty can be found here.

Research in our group takes place along three broad lines: The first theme is corporate finance, including interests such as entrepreneurship and private equity. Second, we investigate financial markets and asset pricing. Our third theme is banking and financial intermediation, including asset management. 

We are looking for highly motivated candidates that have an interest in undertaking research that is both challenging and rigorous, but also has societal relevance. Candidates may have a background in finance, but we also welcome applicants with an education in Economics or Econometrics.

Currently we especially welcome candidates with interests in the following areas:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning 
• Asset management
• Banking and financial intermediation
• Behavioral finance
• Blockchain and tokens 
• Climate finance
• Investments

Innovation Management (IM) involves all the actions needed to generate innovative ideas and turn them into attractive new products, services, and business models. Today’s business credo mandates more innovations, and those innovations become substantially more complex, multi-dimensional and risky. At RSM we study the latest developments in innovation and we investigate how to manage them successfully in practice by linking the latest management theories to business practice.

We are particularly interested in working with PhD students on the following topics:

Idea management: How to cultivate and select the best ideas? Over and over again: Companies increasingly use idea management programs or crowdsourcing platforms to collect as many ideas as possible from their employees or from people outside of the organization. But having many ideas does mean that one has—or is able to recognize—high-quality ideas. Another challenge is that the motivation of people to participate in idea management programs often declines over time. As a result, a firm’s innovation pipeline might dry up and with that the opportunities to successfully compete. Therefore, the question is how the quality of idea submissions can be enhanced, how idea evaluation and selection decisions can be improved, and how sustained levels of creativity can be encouraged.

Personality change and innovation: We live in an age in which people plan, pursue, and experience individual changes that affect career and life trajectories. People improve their educational credentials, change residences, move jobs, switch nationalities, and undergo gender reassignment. All of this is familiar to management researchers. But personality change is only recently emerging in the organizational behavior and management research landscape despite extensive research evidence, practitioner attention and mass-media interest. Management research generally emphasizes the stability of personality structures tends to underestimate the possibility that personality can change. I want to build consensus on the relevance of personality change for research in organizational behavior and manager, with a specific focus on innovation. Research questions of interest include: do people change their personality after a major change in work activities is introduced? How does the use of innovation shape or change psychological variables related to the innovation domain (e.g. openness to experience?) Specifically, I am interested in designing an experimental design in order to assess whether and how personality can change and what are its organizational consequences.

Innovation Strategy: Organizations are in a constant hunt for the next blockbuster design, product, or service to gain or sustain their competitive edge. However, innovation management is not about an endless chase for any creative idea. It requires developing an innovation strategy to direct and achieve innovation-related goals since organizational resources are limited. Innovation strategy helps organizations sense the needs and changes in the business landscape, and transform their organizations by fostering creative ideas and further into product/service and process development implementing these ideas. This Ph.D. project focuses on how and why organizations develop and execute strategies to innovate. It also highlights sustainability as a special topic of attention. This is because organizations can no longer turn a blind eye to the societal and environmental challenges the world faces: waves of pandemics, global warming, pollution, inequality, and ongoing discrimination. We know much less about how organizations can envision, implement, change and govern an innovation strategy—be it via deliberate or emergent—to address societal and environmental challenges. Hence, I welcome candidates motivated to investigate the dual goal of achieving sustainability and competitive advantage as a critical and urgent research direction within the innovation strategy field.

The marketing group at Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) ranks among the best in the world. Our members publish their research in top journals in marketing as well as related fields. They deeply care about open science practices (e.g., data sharing and open-source software), and frequently host seminars to encourage knowledge exchange. The group is diverse (in terms of research interests and cultural background), collaborative, and collegial.

PhD Topics

Our faculty members can supervise PhD students on a broad range of topics, typically divided in three sub-domains: Quantitative Marketing, Consumer Behaviour, or Consumer Neuroscience. Several faculty members work as the intersection of two of these sub-disciplines (e.g., consumer behavior and quantitative marketing), which enables us to cater to students interested in more interdisciplinary research.

Quantitative Marketing:

The faculty in the quantitative group in our department work on a wide range of topics, such as design of multi-armed bandits and reinforcement learning models with applications to recommendation systems and clinical trials (Gui Liberali), virtual / augmented / mixed reality (Yvonne van Everdingen), digital platform markets (David Kusterer), privacy (Gilian Ponte), behavioral economics (Alina Ferecatu), causal inference (Jason Roos), marketing strategy (Gerrit van Bruggen), consumer eye tracking (Ana Martinovici), deep learning (Sebastian Gabel), consumer and firm networks (Xi Chen), customer analytics (Aurélie Lemmens), consumer learning (Maciej Szymanowski) and quantitative modelling approaches to predict the psychological processes involved in consumer judgments and decisions (Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb and Dan Schley).

Consumer Behavior:

Our faculty members in consumer behavior work on a wide range of topics, such as how advertising works psychologically (Steven Sweldens), judgment and decision making (Gabriele Paolacci), self-control and consumption (Mirjam Tuk), how technology augments behavior Shwetha Mariadassou and Anne-Kathrin Klesse), numerical processing (Dan Schley and Christophe Lembregts), biological influences on consumption and goal pursuit (Bram Van den Bergh), how to measure consumer preferences (Antonia Krefeld-Schwalb), pro-social behavior, social credit, and consumer advocacy (Alex Genevsky), marketplace morality (Johannes Boegershausen), and pro-societal consumer interventions (Romain Cadario).

Consumer Neuroscience:

Within the department, researchers at the Center for Neuroeconomics (Maarten van Boksem, Ale Smidts, and Alexander Genevsky) work on a wide range of topics in decision neuroscience such as understanding the neurological basis of emotions, social conformity, dishonesty, charitable giving, consumer judgments and predicting population-level outcomes from neural data.

Leveraging work experience 

Regardless of the specific topic that a PhD student likes to work on, the department sees a lot of value in supervising students who would like to leverage their work experience (e.g., from their current profession) to collect practically relevant data and/or conduct (field) experiments that can provide the empirical basis for their PhD project.

The PhD student’s task will be to:

• identify novel research questions based on real-world phenomena and/or extant theory.
• review existing literature and theories to build a coherent theoretical foundation for his/her own research.
• identify the fundamental variables and relationships that are most important to studying the phenomena at hand and formalize them in a measurement model or set of experimental hypotheses.
• gather experimental or observational data to test hypotheses or measure phenomena.
• identify the critical assumptions needed to draw inferences from empirical results.
• write computer code to analyze experimental or secondary data.
• present research findings at international conferences.
• write up findings for publication in international journals.
• participate in and contribute to departmental research functions (PhD Day, research seminars, weekly research meetings)

Well-connected faculty members

Our faculty members possess excellent networks and have collaborators at top institutions worldwide. Further, several of our faculty members are leading expert practices at the Erasmus Centre for Data Analytics (ECDA). These expert practices fulfil the purpose to bring together academics from various disciplines and practitioners to exchange knowledge and collaborate on research questions surrounding specific topics. More information for each of these expert practices can be found here.   

• Trial Design and Experimentation
• The Psychology of AI lab
• Virtual and Augmented Reality
• Customer Analytics

More information on our faculty members can be found here.

Understanding the way people operate is central to the success of any organisation. Managing people requires understanding organisations in their full complexity, thus at several levels of analysis. The department covers topics on four levels: those that apply to the individual such as leadership, leader development, people management, power, incentives, and goals; those applying at the team level such as diversity, team processes, hierarchy, managerial behaviours, and professional identity; those at organisation level such as organisational learning, organisational design, coordination, organisational culture and change, HR practice and system design, and organisation of work; and topics at the level of the environment such as social, technological, economic changes, and politics.

Research within the department of Organisation and Personnel Management has always been a force for positive change, helping people and organisations worldwide to thrive and prosper. Pioneering faculty work at the forefront of human issues such as diversity, organisational change, employee wellbeing, and leadership studies. Working successfully with business cultures that may have very different methods, expectations and models to those in Europe, the UK and North America constitute an important focus.

Areas of research

More information on possible research directions within the area of OPM will follow soon.

The field of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship focuses on understanding why some firms perform better than others, how firms behave, and what determines success in international competition. Given its broad scope, the field is highly integrative and multi-disciplinary, and feeds on insights from a wide range of disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, law, finance, and economics. The field focuses on actions associated with changing the firm's scope and profile of business lines. It also addresses questions of how decision-makers can best leverage knowledge and innovation to foster competitive advantage for their firms as well as how external forces influence firms and entrepreneurs in a global context and in societies expecting more sustainable strategies. Other topics include entrepreneurial behavior in new ventures, scale-ups, and established organizations. Moreover, the field focuses on how strategic leadership and governance shape firms, firm behavior, and outcomes. 

Current themes that have the focus of our faculty and PhD candidates are:

1. Strategy, Organization, and Governance. This line aims to explain and identify the mechanisms through which modern firms shape and align their organizational structures, governance and ownership with the strategies, resource dependencies, and business models through which they create and capture value.
2. Strategic Entrepreneurship. This strand is concerned with understanding how organizations link entrepreneurial behaviour and strategic advantage-seeking actions to create and capture wealth.
3. Strategy, Knowledge, and Innovation. This theme focuses on how managers and entrepreneurs build and renew the technological, social, and relational capital to shape new technologies and business models.
4. Global Strategy. This branch aims to enrich our understanding of how internationally operating firms form and implement their strategies, and how firms shape, and are shaped by, their global context and societies expecting sustainable practices.
5. Behavioural Strategy and Entrepreneurial Behaviour. This branch informs us about the psychology behind high-impact and complex strategic and entrepreneurial decisions.

More extensive descriptions of these themes can be found here.