Agnes Guenther, PhD

About me

I am a Strategic Designer and Strategy scholar. By applying design processes and a big-picture perspective to strategy development and implementation, I solve complex problems and bring impactful solutions to life that allow businesses to provide unique value to their stakeholders, be at the forefront of innovation, and shape tomorrow.

As a strategy scholar, I combine research on strategic human capital and corporate strategy with principles of design to examine how businesses create and appropriate value through human capital. How does the organizational design affect value creation and appropriation? Can we design firms in a way that reduces turnover? And how to design effective teams and processes within an organization? Some of these questions I examined in my PhD dissertation.

As a testament to its contribution, my dissertation was nominated for the STR Outstanding Dissertation Award in Strategic Management by the Academy of Management in 2022. In 2019, I was selected as an SRF Dissertation Scholar by the Strategy Research Foundation of the Strategic Management Society.

I am currently an ENS Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy in the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah. I received a Ph.D. from Copenhagen Business School in 2021, a M.Sc. in Strategic Product Design from Delft University of Technology, and a BA in Industrial Design and Communication Design from the University of Arts Braunschweig. From 2020-2021, I was co-chair and executive board member of PAND. Before my PhD in Strategy, I worked for several years as a designer and consultant.