CV

Education and professional experience

• Current: Director of Full-Time Doctoral Education, Erasmus Research Institute of Management
• Current: Associate Professor in Strategic Management & Entrepreneurship, Erasmus University Rotterdam
• 2017: Ph.D in Management, Tilburg University
• 2014: Research Master in Business, Tilburg University
• 2012: BSc in International Business Administration, Tilburg University

Publications

• Haans, R.F.J., & Mertens, M. J. (2026). The internet never forgets: A four-step scraping tutorial, codebase, and database for longitudinal organizational website data. Organizational Research Methods 29(1): 113-141.
• Haans, R.F.J., & van Witteloostuijn, A. (2024). Does foreign language liberate or limit creativity? Three experiments on foreign language anxiety and use, and divergent and convergent thinking. International Business Review 33(4): 102305.
• Durand, R. and Haans, R.F.J. 2022. Optimally Distinct? Understanding the motivation and ability of organizations to pursue optimal distinctiveness (or not). Organization Theory 3: 1-16.
• Haans, R.F.J. and Van den Oever, K. 2021. Foreign entrepreneurs engage in less misconduct than native entrepreneurs: Evidence from U.K. director disqualifications. Journal of Business Venturing Insights 16: e00281, 1-7.
• Kaufmann, W. and Haans, R.F.J. (2020). Understanding the Meaning of Concepts Across Domains Through Collocation Analysis. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: 1-16.
• Haans, R.F.J. (2019), "What’s the value of being different when everyone is? The effects of distinctiveness on performance in homogeneous versus heterogeneous categories." Strategic Management Journal, 40(1): 3–27.
• Hannigan, T., Haans, R.F.J., Vakili, K., Tchalian, H., Glaser V.L., Wang, M., Kaplan, S., and Jennings, P.D. "Topic models in management research: Rendering new theory from textual data." Academy of Management Annals 13(2): 586-632.
• Haans, R.F.J. and Van Witteloostuijn, A. 2019. "Regional stickiness of novel ideas in the scholarly International Business community." Cross Cultural & Strategic Management 26(2): 145-165.
• Haans, R.F.J. and Van Witteloostuijn, A. 2018. "Expected job creation across the cultural industries: A sectoral division and its implications for cultural policy." International Journal of Cultural Policy 24(1): 45-67.
• Haans, R.F.J., Pieters, C., and He, Z.L. 2016. "Thinking about U: Theorizing and testing U- and inverted U-shaped relationships in strategy research." Strategic Management Journal 37(7): 1177–1195.

Awards and other recognition

• 2025: Winner of IBR Best Paper Award for 2024, for Does foreign language liberate or limit creativity? Three experiments on foreign language anxiety and use, and divergent and convergent thinking.
• 2025: Recognized as Top Scholar (those whose scholarly contributions rank them within the top 0.5% of all scholars worldwide) in Strategic Management by ScholarGPS.
• 2024: Winner of the TiSEM Academic Impact award, for Thinking about U: Theorizing and testing U- and inverted U-shaped relationships in strategy research.
• 2021: Awarded the inaugural RSM Mariëtte Kaandorp Prize for Excellence in Thesis Mentoring.
• 2020: I was awarded the ERIM Award for Outstanding Performance by a Young Researcher for delivering extremely good research in the two years prior to receiving the award, while having obtained my PhD degree no more than five years prior.
• 2020: I received the “I wish I had written that paper”-award for my work on optimal distinctiveness from the department of Strategic Management and Entrepreneurship at RSM.
• 2020: My 2019 work on optimal distinctiveness in SMJ was among the top 10% most-read articles in 2018-2019
• 2020: My 2019 work on topic modeling AMA was among the second most-read article in 2019
• 2019: Voted best Professor of the Trimester for the course Strategic Management in the Business Administration BSc programme
• 2016: Entrepreneurship Division Best Reviewer Award (Academy of Management Annual Meeting)
• 2016: OMT Division Doctoral Consortium participant (Academy of Management Annual Meeting)
• 2016: Doctoral Consortium participant (Strategic Management Society Special Conference, Rome)
• 2016: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences Honours Programme

Recent teaching

Crafting Your Introduction (PhD; 2025 – now); Navigating the Review Process (PhD; 2025 – now); Alternative Quantitative Approaches (PhD; 2023 – now); Strategic Management (BSc; 2017 - 2025); Quantitative Research in Strategic Management & Strategic Entrepreneurship (MSc; 2017 – 2025); Thesis Coordinator (MSc; 2018 – 2020); Research Clinic Strategic Entrepreneurship & Strategic Management (MSc; 2018 – 2020); International Project (Parttime MSc; 2018 – 2019); New Business Development (MSc; 2017 – 2018); Strategic Entrepreneurship (MPhil; 2017 – 2018)

Service and leadership

• 2025 – Current: Editorial Review Board member - Academy of Management Journal
• 2021 – Current: Editorial Review Board member - Strategic Management Journal
• 2019 – 2025: Data Analytics Chair for the Organization and Management Theory (OMT) Division of the Academy of Management
• 2019 – Current: Member of the Advisory Board, Erasmus Data Service Centre
• Ad-hoc Reviewer for (in alphabetical order), Administrative Science Quarterly, British Journal of Management, European Management Review, Journal of Business Venturing, Journal of International Business Studies, Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies, Journal of Strategy and Management, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Social Forces, Strategic Organization, and Strategy Science.
• Reviewer for the Research Methods Paper Prize of the Strategic Management Society Annual Meeting (2022 - Current)