7th Graduate Student Colloquium

From September 15 to 17, 2026, our 7th Graduate Student Colloquium took place in Schwäbisch Hall—in collaboration with the Strategy, Innovation, and Cooperation Department at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau and hosted by OPTIMA pharma GmbH.

Why there, of all places? Because a “hidden champion” like OPTIMA serves as a real-world laboratory for the very questions that drive our research: highly specialized facilities for the pharmaceutical industry, challenging client projects, and an organization that must constantly rebalance strategic positioning, innovative capacity, and complexity every single day.

That’s exactly what we discussed with the management team—openly, critically, and as equals. Special thanks to Johannes Grobe, Stefan Reuter, and Roland Kurz for their insights and for the plant tours at OPTIMA pharma and OPTIMA Logistik.

The focus was on the doctoral projects from both fields. Taken together, three themes run through them:
- How are goals formed, and what happens to them when projects collide with reality?
- How do organizations deal with tensions: between sustainability and efficiency, between strategy and cooperation?
- What do project-based approaches and AI mean for organizations and society?

Here are two insights, each with a clear message:
AI in research: It can help with thinking. It doesn’t take over the thinking.
Journal fitting: Good papers rarely fail because of their content, but often because they’re submitted to the wrong journal.

Anyone who wants to know where the phrases “Batzen Geld” and “auf Heller und Pfennig” come from in Schwäbisch Hall shouldn’t miss a guided tour of the city. As is so often the case, the group dinners were the setting for the most honest feedback sessions.

Our conclusion: Doctoral studies succeed where theory meets practice, and where doctoral candidates see each other not as competitors but as sparring partners.

A big thank you to Erik Wagner, who made the colloquium at OPTIMA possible and organized it superbly—even as a doctoral candidate right in the thick of things.

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University of Kassel
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Institute for Ergonomics and Process Management
Division of Project Management in Digital Transformation

Prof. Timo Braun, Ph.D., habil.
Engineering Sciences III (7090), 4th Floor, Room 4221
Mönchebergstr. 7
D-34125 Kassel