Professor Christopher Lettl is Director of the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna). He is also Academic Director of the Vienna Innovation Program, a collaboration of WU Vienna with Top Universities from the United States.

His research focuses on the paradigm-shifting phenomenon of open and user innovation. He studies how organizations may best manage the opportunities and threats induced by this phenomenon with a specific focus on implications for strategy and organization design. Beyond this and more generally, he is interested in the areas of entrepreneurship, innovation management, strategic management, and organization theory. He has been cooperating in his research with scholars from renowned international institutions such as for example Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Berkeley University of California, Bocconi University, Copenhagen Business School, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. He received extensive research funding from various renowned funding organizations. 

The results of his research have been presented on international conferences and published in leading academic journals like Organization Science, Journal of Consumer Research, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, Journal of Product Innovation Management or Journal of Management Studies. His research has been featured in leading business media, including the New York Times and Handelsblatt. He received numerous research and teaching awards.

He serves the scientific community in numerous functions as Co-Editor and Referee for international journals, conferences, search committees, and funding organizations. For example, he has been a Referee for leading academic journals such as for example Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal or Journal of Consumer Research, and he is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Product Innovation Management and the Journal of Organization Design. He served as Key Note Speaker at distinguished policy events and as Key Note Speaker at distinguished academic conferences such as for example the Open and User Innovation Conference 2014 at Harvard Business School. He has been serving as Academic Advisor for the G8-G5 Heiligendamm Process on Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, for the UK Minister of Science and Innovation, and for the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Resort: Invest in Denmark). At the European Forum Alpbach he repeatedly contributed as Speaker and Organizer of breakout sessions.

He consulted numerous companies including for example IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Lego, or Bang & Olufsen in their entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives. He has founded and established several educational programs in entrepreneurship and innovation management and teaches in the EDEN doctoral program of the European Institute of Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). He is founding member of the Open and User Innovation Society and Organizer of the Doctoral Consortium at the Open and User Innovation Conference. Beyond leading the Institute and contributing to the development of the Department, he serves WU in numerous other positions such as for example as Member of the Advisory Board of the WU-OMV Energy and Strategy Think Tank or as Co-Organizer of the Speaker Series at the Department of Strategy and Innovation.

From October 2016 until September 2019 he served as Chairman of the WU Senate and as Representative of WU’s Full Professors.