Dr. Maarten Cerpentier

Bio

Maarten Cerpentier is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation of ETH Zurich. Maarten holds a Ph.D. in Business Economics from Ghent University, Belgium. Before joining ETH, he was a Swiss Government Excellence postdoc fellow at the Department of Business Administration, University of Zurich.

His research encompasses a variety of topics, including open innovation, new product commercialization, the financing of young ventures, and impact investing. His work has been published in leading academic journals and books such as Research Policy, the Journal of Technology Transfer, and the Handbook of Scaling and High-Growth Firms. He has presented his research at various international conferences, including the Academy of Management and the DRUID annual conference.

Education

Ph.D. in Business Economics, Ghent University
M.Sc. / B.Sc. in Business Economics, Ghent University

Publications

Vanacker, T., & Cerpentier, M. (2025). The financing of scaling and high-growth firms. In Handbook of Research on Scaling and High-Growth Firms (pp. 269-287). Edward ElgarPublishing.

Cerpentier, M., Schulze, A., Vanacker, T., & Zahra, S. A. (2024). Employment protection laws and the commercialization of new products: A cross-country study. Research Policy, 53(7), 105039.

Cerpentier, M., Vanacker, T., Paeleman, I., & Bringmann, K. (2022). Equity crowdfunding, market timing, and firm capital structure. The Journal of Technology Transfer, 47(6), 1766-1793.

Service

Reviewer, Academy of Management annual conference

Reviewer, DRUID annual conference

Ad-hoc reviewer, Research Policy, British Journal of Management, Small Business Economics, Journal of Business Research, Technovation

Selected conference contributions

Academy of Management annual conference (2021, 2023, 2025)

Impact investing days (2025)

DRUID annual conference (2022, 2023)

Open and User Innovation conference (2022)

Master thesis supervision

If you are interested in writing your thesis on a topic related to my research areas (not limited to, but particularly: open innovation and new product commercialization), I welcome you to reach out and discuss thesis topics or projects. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are possible; quantitative topics based on firm-level innovation data (e.g., from the Swiss Innovation and Digitalization Survey dataset) will be prioritized. Potential topics: Quantitative analysis based on firm-level open innovation data: How do firms combine traditional search for knowledge with the use of artificial intelligence to boost innovation? How do firms structure their search-for-knowledge activities over time to remain competitive?