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Guenter Koch
Prof. DI Guenter Koch, born 1947 in Freiburg, Germany, merges several and even divergent qualifications in his person: entrepreneur, manager and scientist. His last appointment as a manager was in 1998 as the CEO of the Austrian Research Centres (ARC), Seibersdorf, Austria's largest research organization employing some 1200 scientists in many different disciplines such as material sciences, life sciences, information technologies, system research, medical technology etc. His first appointment in Austria was in the early 90s, when he was invited to become a guest professor at the computer science faculty at Graz Technical University, giving lectures on System Architectures and System Design. From 1993 to 1997 he was the General Director of the European Software Institute (ESI) in Bilbao, Spain, a public-private institution established by the European Commission together with major European computer and software companies as well as the local government. ESI concentrated on topics of professionalisation in and economisation of software development, specifically by focusing on software processes and their qualities. For a short period in 1997 he joined SUN Microsystems international Enterprise Center in Geneva, Switzerland, as a chief software architect.
After having been assistant professor at Karlsruhe University's computer science faculty in 1975, he became founder managing director of a systems company specializing first in medical informatics in 1981, later in automation and in software technology. He served this company until 1993 when he sold his shares. In parallel, from 1984 to 1987, he acted as the CEO of a technology & incubator center in Germany.
After he had left from Karlsruhe becoming CEO of his start-up company, Koch continued to give lectures at several universities on different subjects in technology and management, such as in 2000 on R&D management at the Technical University of Vienna. His experience specifically in R&D and in software process management motivated him to create a method for analysing the intellectual capital of think organisations, in cooperation with Prof. Ursula Schneider; Graz. They created what is currently the most widely used reference model for Intellectual Capital Reporting, first time applied at the Austrian Research Centres in 1999, which today can demonstrate the longest history of subsequent reportings on intellectual capital development.
Koch today acts as the president of the Austrian Association for research in IT, he is member of the board of the Fraunhofer Institute FIRST in Berlin, he runs a regular workshop in Freiburg across different disciplines thereby also employing visioning as a method for setting future scenarios and decision strategies. He is an outspoken expert in defining and identifying intellectual assets in brain organisations. Currently, together with prominent colleagues from knowledge science disciplines, such as Leif Edvinsson (Sweden) and Ahmed Bounfour (France). He is a member of a High Level Expert group giving advice to the European Commission on how intellectual capital can be valuated. He is a regular commentator on science topics in Austrias most widely read newspaper. He acts as a partner of a knowledge management firm, as a guest professor at the Danube University and as a consultant to governments, banks, industries, specifically software dependant industries, not the least in his role as a member of the board of the Association of the Austrian Software Industry.
His private interests are in theatre, cooking, travelling and biking.