The following professors and employees are involved in research activities with the Future Engineering research group.

Prof. Ralph Blum is head of the research collaboration, Future Engineering, and the Fraunhofer IIS Future Engineering research group. He researches and lectures on innovation management, industrial product and market development, brand management, and sales at the Faculty of Business Administration. Prof. Blum also chairs Innovationswerkstatt e.V., an association that supports project-related collaboration between companies, students and lecturers in the field of corporate and business development.

Prof. Frank Ebinger lectures on sustainability, innovation management, corporate social responsibility, and social transformation at the Faculty of Business Administration. He holds the research professorship in sustainability-oriented innovation and transformation management (NIT) at the Nuremberg Campus of Technology (NCT). He also researches how the development of transformation processes can be analysed from a growing database of public sources. In June 2020, Prof. Ebinger was appointed a member of the German EMAS Advisory Board.

Prof. Roland Zimmermann teaches data competence, business intelligence (BI) and information design at the Faculty of Business Administration. He conducts research on synthetic reasoning in BI systems as well as on knowledge graphs and natural language processing for technology and innovation management.

Prof. Jens Albrecht teaches machine learning processes for the analysis of natural language texts, including as part of his “Text Analytics” course at the Faculty of Computer Science. He also engages in various collaborative projects with the Faculty of Social Sciences to investigate how knowledge from textual data can be used to support psychosocial online counseling. Within the Future Engineering research group, he applies his skills and knowledge particularly in the area of extraction mechanisms.

Prof. Volker Bilgram joined the faculty at the Ohm in 2022 and is responsible for the field of innovation management. He focuses on consumer insights and new influences in innovation processes, e.g., from artificial intelligence.

Alexander Köhler has been employed as a research associate at Fraunhofer SCS since 2012. His specialisation is in data-based market and technology analyses and business development for new developments at Fraunhofer IIS, and in diverse research and industry projects. In January 2021, he became a research associate at the Ohm and has been deputy head of the research group since September 2021.

Kiara Ascencion has been a research associate at the Ohm since 2021. Her focus is on the semantic processing of texts, the information structuring and knowledge presentation through knowledge graphs and ontologies, and the development of digital methods for detecting market and technology changes.

Natalie Rubin has been a research associate at the Ohm since 2023. She works on the identification, analysis, and visualisation of user-oriented online contents in order to transfer market research methods into automatable forms. Her scientific focus is primarily in consumer insights and market and competition analysis.

Stefan Reichert has been a research associate at the Fraunhofer IIS since April 2024. He works on data analysis and data structuring, the stabilisation of technical processes within the IT infrastructure of the research group, and developing them. He focuses on information structuring and knowledge presentation through knowledge graphs and ontologies.

Philipp Haan,

M.Sc.

philipp.haanatiis.fraunhoferPunktde
Supply Chain Services Working Group at the
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Nordostpark 84, 90411 Nuremberg

Philipp Haan has been a research associate at Fraunhofer IIS since 2021. He has two areas of specialization:true-to-scale data collection from online sources and the adaptation and development of data analysis tools (primarily in the area of language processing) to extrapolate relevant findings from the data.
 

Raphael Leicht,

M.A.

raphael.leichtatiis.fraunhoferPunktde
Supply Chain Services Working Group at the
Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS
Nordostpark 84, 90411 Nuremberg

After Raphael Leicht completed his master’s thesis in collaboration with the Fraunhofer IIS in 2022, he has been employed as a research associate since 2023 at the institute. His specialisation is in the analysis of the logistics market. Data from market research is linked with various technological procedures to illustrate the logistics market in various levels of detail.

Partners

To mutually reinforce their activities in the field of data-based trend and scenario research, the Nuremberg Institute of Technology (with its Nuremberg Campus of Technology NCT) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS (with its Supply Chain Services SCS research area) founded the Future Engineering research group. Additionally, the research group works closely with the Center for Artificial Intelligence (KIZ)