Georges Romme

Georges Romme (Dutch: Sjoerd; born 29 February 1960) is a Dutch organizational theorist, academic and author. He is a full professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation at Eindhoven University of Technology.

Romme is known for introducing design science to organization and management studies. He has also pioneered the thesis circle as a form of collaborative supervision and has published on professionalism and organizational hierarchy. He has authored and co-authored research articles and books, including The Quest for Professionalism: The Case of Management and Entrepreneurship, for which he received the EURAM Best Book Award and the Responsible Research in Management Award in 2017. He is also the recipient of the 2016 Tjalling C. Koopmans Asset Award from Tilburg University and the 2019 Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner Award from the Academy of Management.

Education and career Romme earned a BSc degree in Economics in 1981 and an MSc degree in 1984, both from Tilburg University. He worked as an assistant professor in Strategic Management at Maastricht University from 1989 to 1992 and obtained a doctoral degree from Maastricht University in 1992.

Romme served as the Dean of the Industrial Engineering & Innovation Sciences (IE & IS) department of Eindhoven University of Technology from 2007 to 2014. Concurrently, he was the chairman of the Supervisory Board of Research School Beta from 2007 to 2014. He was also a member of various advisory boards, including the Scientific Advisory Board of Aalto University's School of Science (2011–2020).

Romme was a co-founder of EIT InnoEnergy. He served as the Ambassador for Entrepreneurship at Eindhoven University of Technology and currently is a fellow at the Center for Design Science in Entrepreneurship at the ESCP Business School, Berlin.

Research Romme's scholarly work involves three main areas: the professionalization of the management discipline, design science methodology, and organizational hierarchy and circularity.

Quest for Professionalism Romme has authored and co-authored several publications exploring the realm and purpose of business and management scholarship. In The Quest for Professionalism: The Case of Management and Entrepreneurship, which won the 2017 EURAM Best Book Award, Jan Spruijt, reviewing the book, wrote that it "is a one-of-a-kind taking a much needed reflective approach to leadership and a critical note towards the level of professionalism that many of us are approaching the science of management and entrepreneurship with."

Design science Romme's publications on design science have focused on developing and applying a research methodology that addresses the rigor-relevance gap in organization and management research, inspired by Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial. Romme advocated the adoption of the design approach as a primary research mode (alongside the social sciences and humanities as prevailing modes) in the field of management, emphasizing the role of ideal targets, design principles, and practical solutions to bridge the persistent gap between theory and practice.

In many joint publications, Romme applied design science to develop and test solutions for major problems and challenges. These include design principles and various best practices for creating university spin-offs; a tool for mapping, analyzing and designing innovation ecosystems; and the blueprint of HighTechXL as a deep-tech venture builder. This latter work also encompassed the design and implementation of a new venture capital fund dedicated to early-stage deep-tech ventures.

Organizational hierarchy and circularity In his early work on organizational hierarchy and circularity, Romme collaborated with Gerard Endenburg to codify Sociocracy as a novel organizational form in which power flows in a circular manner. This work later informed the development of Holacracy.

In more recent work, Romme categorized hierarchical organization into four types—that is, hierarchy based on formal authority, achieved status, self-organized responsibility, and ideology—each involving a distinct social mechanism, thereby offering a typology for understanding hierarchy in complex social systems.

Awards and honors 1996 – Wynand Wijnen Education Prize, Maastricht University 2014 – Honorary Medal, Eindhoven University of Technology 2016 – Tjalling C. Koopmans Asset Award, Tilburg University 2025 – Edith Penrose Award for Trailblazing Researchers, European Academy of Management