Prof. Dr. Bernhard H. Vollmar

After vocational training and activity as as a Bank Business Management Assistant (Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen), Bernhard H. Vollmar studied Business Administration at the Georg-August University Göttingen. Following his studies (from which he graduated as a Diplom Kaufmann), he was employed, for several years, as a consultant and research associate for an international management company. During his employment as a research assistant at the Institute of Banking and Finance (IfBG, Department of Business Finance and Banking Management) at the Georg-August University Göttingen, he gained his doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) with a study focusing on basic theory ("Trust and construction of realities – implications for economic theorizing").

After that, he became a research assistant at the Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship at the Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg. In addition to foundation-specific teaching and research (including acquisition of third-party funding), he acted as an adviser for business starters and was involved in network activity at the interface between university and business, as part of the EXIST-III project "North-West Business Plan", among other things. In parallel, he was employed as the managing director of VentureLab Oldenburg e.V., the business starter centre for young and start-up companies. He contributes his management expertise to an innovative start-up company as co-founder, co-shareholder and managing director.

He carries out teaching contracts at the University of Vechta and Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, and acts as a referee for international entrepreneurship journals and conferences. In the context of his Habilitation project in the Faculty of Business Sciences at Carl von Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, he is examining the topic area "Management, decision-making and communicative constitution of actual organisational practice".

In October 2009, he accepted the offer of a professorship in General Business Administration, specialising in Entrepreneurship, at PFH Göttingen, and has since been responsible for practically oriented teaching and research and innovative practice-based projects relating specifically to business start-ups, focusing on both young and established companies. Since the spring of 2010, he has been head of the ZE Centre for Entrepreneurship.

• Entrepreneurship
• Corporate finance
• Business and organisation theory (including empirical business research)
• Decision-making, communication, trust and action theory in business administrative contexts (particularly from an entrepreneurship and SME perspective)
• Epistemology and science theory as well as methodology of the business sciences, non-dualism
• Entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial finance

• Constitutive concept: "Entrepreneurship as a special form of trust-based economic behaviour in practice caught between crisis and routine."
• Theoretical plea: "Theoretical stringency in the business sciences requires meta-disciplinarity and inter-disciplinarity as well as systematic openness to new ideas."
• To prepare the evolutionary steps on the path to becoming a learning entrepreneur systematically and to make them tangible. This implies: promoting and demanding ability to act entrepreneurially in all its facets and using entrepreneurial initiative(s) to render the emerging development and implementation of strategy transparent to up-and-coming managerial talent that thinks in entrepreneurial terms.
• Sensitising, motivating and qualifying students in terms of an ability to live entrepreneurship and providing long-term support and concomitant advice therefor. This implies, in particular: the consistent stimulation and promotion of university start-ups and project-related collaboration with SMEs in innovation management.