Dr. Robin Bürger

Dr. Robin Bürger has been with Fraunhofer since 2010, initially joining the Fraunhofer Center for International Management and Knowledge Economy IMW in Leipzig as a research scientist. Since 2015, he has led the “Crowd Innovation” unit, which became part of Fraunhofer ISI at the Leipzig location on January 1, 2025. Prior to joining Fraunhofer, he studied Business Administration at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, specializing in public finance and international marketing, and graduated in 2007 with a degree in Business Administration (Diplom-Kaufmann). He subsequently earned his Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena in 2010, focusing on entrepreneurship and finance. Throughout his career, Dr. Bürger has combined academic research with practical innovation activities. In addition to publishing in the fields of entrepreneurship and finance, he led the international innovation transfer projects ACTCLEAN and PRESOURCE during his time at Fraunhofer IMW. More recently, within the framework of the BMBFTR project “Crowd Innovation,” he played a leading role in developing an open innovation platform designed to support early-stage market validation and strengthen promising innovation projects beyond the Fraunhofer network. Another applied innovation initiative, “crowdFANding,” received the Thuringian Innovation Award in the People’s Choice category in 2016 and, following several successful project cycles, was awarded the Central German Fundraising Prize in silver in 2019. As a trained banker, Dr. Bürger also brings several years of professional experience in innovation financing. He serves as an expert for the Förderkreis Gründungs-Forschung e.V. and teaches an open innovation and crowdsourcing as a lecturer at the Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena and the Technical University of Darmstadt.