TUM School of Management celebrates 10 years of success

The entrepreneur's "inner engineer"

A lecture on business finance in the morning, followed by experiments in the chemistry lab in the afternoon – all part of a typical day for Technology and Management (TUM-BWL) students. As well as learning management skills, the managers of the future spend four semesters studying chemistry, electrical engineering and information technology, mechanical engineering, and computer science. They attend the same lessons as their fellow students from other faculties. Businessmen and women who understand exactly how engineers work  such graduates are in high demand in today’s job market.

What is the business value of a new technology? How can natural science start-ups plan for success? What does sustainable resource management in agriculture mean? The TUM School of Management takes an interdisciplinary approach to research as well as teaching. By cross-fertilizing business administration know-how with engineering and the natural and life sciences, the faculty has built up a research profile that is quite unique in Germany. Part of its work involves fostering close ties with the corporate world, like the recent partnership with Stadtwerke München to create the Center for Energy Markets. 

Best business studies faculty in Germany

TUM has a long tradition in business and economics. In 1872, it created the Chair of Business Administration for Agriculture Management, and in 1922 the business college Handelshochschule München was integrated with Technische Hochschule München, as the university was known at the time. The establishment and expansion of the faculty has been instrumental in boosting TUM’s profile. From energy through mobility to nutrition, TUM’s researchers analyze new developments to gauge their economic potential. “The School of Management is an essential pillar in our entrepreneurial culture,” emphasizes Herrmann. “Over the last ten years, we have invested heavily in the recruitment of internationally renowned researchers. Today, we can see that our strategy of excellence has paid off – to the benefit of our graduates and TUM as a whole.”

In this year’s “Handelsblatt” university rankings, the TUM School of Management was rated as the best business studies faculty in Germany in terms of research. TUM’s Technology and Management course also gained top marks for teaching last year, topping the Center for Higher Education (CHE) ranking. “As well as giving our students the knowledge they will require, we also want to instill an entrepreneurial spirit and a sense of corporate social responsibility,” explains Dean Gunther Friedl, who last week was named “Professor of the Year” by the magazine “Unicum” in association with KPMG in acknowledgment of his ability to prepare his students for their future working lives.

Professors recruited from MIT or Imperial College

The faculty currently has 26 professorships. It has established ten new professorships in the past three years alone. Five of the ten lastly appointed professors were women and six were recruited from outside Germany, coming from institutions like MIT and Imperial College London. The TUM-BWL Bachelor program has been one of the university’s most popular courses for some years now. The Master’s program meanwhile is divided into five different courses, each with a different focus on engineering, the natural sciences or life sciences. In all of the courses, lecturers from the corporate world give students the benefit of their practical experience.

To mark the ten-year anniversary, TUM has conferred an honorary doctorate on an outstanding partner who embodies the philosophy of the TUM School of Management. Martin Winterkorn, CEO of Volkswagen AG and Porsche Automobil Holding SE, has been honored for his exceptional skill in combining technology and management studies, in particular in the area of business strategy and development. Winterkorn studied metallurgy and metal physics at the University of Stuttgart. He completed his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research. After that, he held various positions at Robert Bosch, Audi and Volkswagen. He was CEO of Audi AG until 2007, when he took over at the helm of Europe’s largest automobile manufacturer.

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TUM School of Management

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