Yesterday, we had the pleasure of welcoming Dr. Maximilian Schmidt and Hannes Doering from Kienbaum to our master’s course “Performance Management and Strategy Execution”. As Uni Münster alumni themselves, Max, as a former student, and Hannes, as a PhD graduate, gave our students a very practice-oriented deep dive into incentive design at the interface of scale-ups and mature firms.

Drawing on their extensive project experience in Kienbaum’s Compensation & Performance Management division, illustrated how the design of long-term incentives (LTI) systematically differs between hypergrowth scale-ups and established firms. A particular focus was on LTI design in the context of integrating a scale-up into a large group, and how to balance entrepreneurial “skin in the game” with group policies, governance requirements, and stakeholder acceptance.

A big thank you to both of you for returning to Münster for this guest lecture and sharing your practical insights on incentive systems and strategy execution. We are looking forward to welcoming you back in the future!