Simon Czermak and Markus Kittler receive MCI professorships

In recognition of their outstanding achievements in research and teaching and the related successful translation of research results into teaching, their proven practical experience and their exemplary contributions to the further development of the Entrepreneurial School®, MCI recently conferred the title of professor on Dr. Simon Czermak and Dr. Markus Kittler. Both Czermak and Kittler are members of the faculty of the MCI Department of Management & Law.

In the presence of families, friends, colleagues and students, MCI Rector Andreas Altmann, Deputy Head of the MCI Academic Council Claudia Mössenlechner, and Head of Department Ralf Geymayer presented the certificates of appointment.

Dr. Simon Czermak

Simon Czermak has been a member of the teaching and research team of the MCI Department of Management & Law since 2013. He earned his doctorate in social and economic sciences from the University of Innsbruck and later gained practical experience in the branch office of the Austrian Economic Chambers in Chicago and as marketing and sales manager of a medium-sized Austrian company. In 2007, he returned to the University of Innsbruck as a research assistant and assistant professor. Since 2011, Czermak has been working at MCI, first as a project manager and key accountant in the further education division (MCI Executive Education) before moving to the Department of Management & Law.

Simon Czermak does research in the field of experimental economics and investigates, in particular, the decision-making behavior of people. In his exciting inaugural address “Incentives for Dishonesty”, he gave the audience a brief introduction to the nature of homo economicus, before using a concrete example to demonstrate to what extent reward and incentive systems promote dishonesty and ultimately harm the overall system.

CV Simon Czermak

Dr. Markus Kittler

Markus Kittler joined the MCI team last year. He is a member of the Department of Management & Law and is involved in the Executive PhD Program of the Entrepreneurial School® and Antwerp Management School. Previously, he taught at the University of Stirling in the UK, where he coordinated the research unit for management, work and organization, headed Master’s and doctoral programs, and won several prizes for his teaching activities. He received his doctorate for his excellent research work in the field of intercultural communication at the Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen, which dealt with the understanding of misunderstandings in intercultural communication contexts.

In his inaugural address, Kittler applied his intercultural perspective to a practical problem, namely the communication between scientists and practitioners: “Academic-practitioners exchange: taking a cross-cultural perspective”. By drawing on several communication models, he explained the complexity of human communication and analyzed the dynamics of communication and its potential disturbances on the basis of a concrete project in which researchers and practitioners work together.

CV Markus Kittler