Maths was already her favourite subject at school: statistics expert Dr. Sonja Lück unlocks the secrets behind series of numbers. Today, her data analyses help companies to make the most of their innovative potential.
Which does she prefer, research or teaching? Sonja Lück doesn't have to think twice: "I like both, very much in fact." On the one hand, there are those days when she loses herself in data series for hours on end - the feeling of concentrated curiosity. And then there are the wonderful moments when she manages to get students excited about her subject area, statistics. "That always makes me happy."
In everyday life, the senior lecturer at Paderborn University has to skilfully juggle her working hours: During the semester, she offers 16 teaching hours per week at the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics - almost twice as many as professors do. In the lecture-free periods, she then travels to meetings with colleagues, especially in the USA, where she is a member of an international academic team at the University of California, Berkeley. "Those are intense days: we work together from morning to night, sometimes we're silent for hours because we're analysing data, and then we suddenly throw ideas at each other, look at interim results with fascination or develop completely new questions: I love this alternation between individual research and creative teamwork," says Lück.
She has been working at Paderborn University since 2003, first as a doctoral student, then as a permanent employee. Today, she holds a full-time position at the faculty - without a professorship. "In the academic world, a position like this is a rare stroke of luck," explains the 45-year-old. She already knows the university from her studies: she studied business administration there and was initially enthusiastic about marketing issues, but then quickly discovered her preference for statistics - which is not really surprising, as maths was always her favourite subject at school.
Today, she specialises in innovation research: Lück uses data analyses to investigate how companies can be encouraged to pursue inventions. Patents, which companies use to publicise and legally protect their new developments, are an important indicator of this. However, these applications repeatedly present companies with a dilemma: many companies want to keep their inventions secret from the competition for as long as possible. At the same time, however, there is a risk that they will invest heavily in their research - without realising that competing companies have long been working on very similar projects.
In the scientific debate, this duplication of research effort was previously regarded as a burden on the economy, but the assumption has never been proven. However, Lück has now been able to prove the phenomenon with the help of patent data from the USA and Europe and show that early patent publications actually prevent unnecessary duplicate investments. This evidence is considered so important in business administration that Lück's study - for which she is the lead author - will be published in 2020 in the journal "Management Science", one of the leading journals in the field of economics. Lück also received the Dean's Young Scholar Research Award from her faculty for her work.
However, she has not only received awards for her research: her teaching has also been honoured. She recently received the Teaching Award from the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics. In the laudatory speech, her commitment to students was praised in particular: Lück supervises them intensively and individually and also gives them regular feedback.
To ensure this is successful, she is constantly testing new teaching concepts as a lecturer, explains Lück, such as the inverted classroom . She records her lecture as a video and sends it to the participants of her seminars and lectures in advance. This allows them to optimise their preparation in terms of content. Lück can then use the face-to-face lessons themselves exclusively to answer students' questions and, above all, to offer them exercises. These are particularly important to Lück: "A good lecture alone may sound interesting, but it is quickly forgotten. For the knowledge to stick, the students need to have thought through and applied what they have heard themselves."
Her events are well received by the participants - this judgement is particularly important to the lecturer. After all, as a researcher, she has long been involved in teaching evaluation at universities: While still a doctoral candidate, she began investigating how reliable the evaluations that students give their lecturers are. She was able to analyse 10,000 anonymised evaluation forms and investigate, for example, whether professors receive worse feedback from their course participants if they had previously given them strict grades. Or observe how different the judgement is depending on which degree programme the respondents have taken within economics.
At the same time, Lück emphasises that teaching must also be fun for the lecturers - only then does it have the power to inspire others. She herself experienced this with her doctoral supervisor Manfred Kraft: the now retired statistics professor at Paderborn University is still her role model today. "I hope that, like him, I manage to teach with such passion for so many years," says Lück.
Anyone who experiences her in everyday life is sure: she has enough energy for it.
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