Business Research Partnership between Industry and JKU Linz 3 minutes spent reading
Innovation

Business Research Partnership between Industry and JKU Linz

Viktoria Steiniger (Maternity Leave)
Holds editorial responsibility for blog topics, is researching and writing articles. Her stories give insights into the world of the voestalpine Group.

Fronius Perfect Welding, voestalpine Group’s steel division, and Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz are embarking on a business research partnership in 2018.

The focus here will be on the digitization of customer relationships in the global automotive industry and its impacts on marketing and sales in the supply industries. The partnership will run until 2022.

The new year saw the start of a business research partnership between Fronius Perfect Welding, voestalpine Group’s steel division, and the B2B Marketing department at the Institute for Trade, Retail, and Marketing at JKU Linz. The focus of the partnership will be a research project which will last for four years. The research assistant position required for this will be jointly financed by the two industrial companies, thereby expanding the existing partnership between voestalpine Group’s steel division and the Marketing Institute at JKU, which has been running since 2005.

Over the next four years, a doctoral student will be looking at the impacts of digitization on customer relationships and customer benefit. Bernhard Freiseisen, Senior Manager Strategic Marketing at Fronius Perfect Welding, explains the potential of the project, “This project will not only allow us to increase our emphasis on customer focus and digitized customer relations in practice, but it will also allow us to evolve based on the results of in-depth research.”

Target industry automotive industry

A shared marketing-oriented view of the target industry, the automotive industry, from the perspective of various supply industries will open up the potential for cross-industry networking, and allow the various parties to complement one another as regards content. The cooperation with industry partners will also contribute to an increased focus on application-oriented research at JKU.

Image 1: from left to right: Harald Langeder (Fronius), Prof. Thomas Werani (JKU), Bernhard Freiseisen (Fronius), Elisabeth Engelbrechtsmüller-Strauß (CEO Fronius), Werner Dressler (voestalpine), Prof. Gerhard Wührer (JKU). Picture: Fronius International GmbH

Viktoria Steiniger (Maternity Leave)