Welcome to Innovation@Baruch!

I am Dr. Maria A. Halbinger, currently Associate Professor of Innovation & Creativity in the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Baruch College.

I specialize in innovation research, with a particular focus on open and distributed modes of innovation. Distributed innovation systems compete increasingly successfully with traditional, in-house innovation efforts by incumbent organizations. This is because individual, distributed actors are steadily enabled to collaborate, innovate and startup new ventures – a “democratization of innovation” (von Hippel, 1988, 2005).

An important promoter of this shift is the rapidly growing digitalization. Advanced technologies, powerful design and communication tools and new crowd-based infrastructures are becoming more and more available to all, making innovation processes increasingly fluid, collaborative and better distributed.

In light of this trend, my research is directed towards investigating technological innovation in an increasingly shared, knowledge and technology propelled, digitalized economy. Accordingly, I have published and currently work on research projects that examine the factors related to the development of innovation, its (successful) diffusion via new venture creation and funding thereof.