Knut is an Associate Professor in Strategy and International Business at Birmingham Business School at the University of Birmingham. His research covers comparative country studies, internationalisation support, family businesses, entrepreneurship education, innovation, and the blue economy.

Knut joined Birmingham Business School in August 2023. Before joining the School, he worked at Royal Holloway University of London, the University of Surrey and as a research fellow at Humboldt and Free University in Berlin. Also, he worked as a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and the University of Groningen at the Department of International Business and Management, where he also did his PhD. Furthermore, he is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Southampton Business School and Cluster Associate of the Social and Sustainable Enterprise Cluster at the Open University.

Knut is currently involved in four research projects, most drawing on institutional theory.

(1) Chinese family businesses, with an emphasis on growth and paradoxes

(2) Entrepreneurship education and employability in the context of the UK Higher Education system

(3) The blue economy and UN sustainable development goals, with an emphasis on SDG 14 (Life Below Water)

(4) The role of foreign chambers of commerce in facilitating SME internationalisation 

Furthermore, Knut has published on business systems from a comparative perspective and their impact on areas such as firm internationalisation support, the extension of home-country institutions into the host context, innovation, family offices, human resource practices, and business models. Moreover, he also published on global innovation networks in the semiconductor industry.