Matti Wirth's PhD thesis completed: Proactive Transformation by Regional Strategic Design
On 18.01.2019, our staff member Matti Wirth successfully passed his doctoral examination. In his work, he developed a new concept for regions and their stakeholders to proactively shape regional change, thereby reducing potential crises and the requirement for future remediation operations as much as possible (Proactive Transformation).
Through this research, long-term requirements have been taken into account, regional principles of action have been developed through a case study comparison and a new model for "regional strategic design" has been proposed. The latter serves to qualify and accelerate regional development processes for a Proactive Transformation. The model was tested over a period of about four years using the example of the Rhenish lignite mining area, an area which increasingly faces change.
Reviewers of the work were Prof. Frank Lohrberg as doctoral supervisor and Prof. Detlef Kurth of the University of Kaiserslautern. The oral exam was also conducted by Prof. Christa Reicher and Prof. Agnes Förster from RWTH Aachen University. The work will be published in the coming months.