Bjørn-Tore Flåten

Bjørn-Tore Flåten is an Associate Professor at the University of Agder (UiA), Norway. He holds a PhD in International Management from UiA and a MSc in Economics and Business Administration from NHH Norwegian School of Economics. Prior to joining UiA he served as a unit manager in a major Norwegian non-profit organization where he held responsibilities for personnel and training and for managing international educational tours for groups of 150 people involving cross-cultural exchanges. He is also an experienced consultant with a record of managing projects involving organizational structure and design, change, re-structuring, and building of compensation and evaluation schemes in different industries.

His research interests revolve around strategic management of knowledge work and entrepreneurship, with a particular focus on knowledge sharing and Internet-enabled collaboration within and beyond the boundaries of the firm. Flåten has contributed with book chapters to research-focused edited books, as well as published in journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Information and Organization, Journal of e-Business, Journal of Design Thinking and the European Journal of International Management. 

Flåten is responsible for the entrepreneurship activities in the “FORTHEM” alliance (https://www.forthem-alliance.eu), which is a network of nine multidisciplinary public research universities with a strong regional anchoring in Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Romania and Spain. Additionally, he is participating in the MEUR 2.2 Horizon project,  “BlueRev” (https://www.bluerevproject.eu), which is aiming at revitalizing local communities in Europe with innovative bio-based businesses, governance models and social innovations focused on the blue bio-based sector. 

Currently, Flåten is serving as the Head of Department of Management and as the Vice Dean for the School of Business and Law. Flåten is also heading the university’s Centre for Entrepreneurship, where he seeks to expand and promote an entrepreneurial mindset. Through the centers programs, students are trained on how to run their own business from the inception of an idea through its implementation.  Through the center, Flåten has also launched UiA Innovation and UiA CoLAB, who’s objective is commercialization of research and co-creation. Hence, a student incubator was launched at the university in 2017 and the Norwegian Research Council granted close to NOK 5 mill in support through the FORNY 2020 program for promoting innovation based on research through a partnership between UiA Innovation and  Innoventus Sør AS.