Marlene Johansson is a senior lecturer at Umeå School of Business, Umeå University, and has been the director of Sliperiet on the Arts Campus for the past three years. Her work there has focused on building up the business with the aim that Sliperiet will function as a creative meeting place for collaboration and innovation.
- We are very happy with our new CEO. Marlene Johansson has great expertise, the will and the ability to harness the creativity and competence that exists at Umeå University and in the business community. Marlene is an inspiration and has a great commitment to how Uminova Expression and Sliperiet can be further developed together. In addition, she has a broad experience of collaboration and her research and teaching are close to the subject matter of the new assignment," says Agneta Marell, chair of the board of Uminova Expression.
Marlene will be an important driving force in realising Umeå University's and Umeå municipality's ambition to contribute to the creation of knowledge-intensive companies," says Agneta Marell.
Marlene Johansson's main task will be to continue building Uminova Expression as a testing and development platform and to develop ideas and companies together with entrepreneurs, researchers, employees and students," says Roland Carlsson, Vice Chairman of the Board of Uminova Expression.
Marlene Johansson will take up her position as CEO of Uminova Expression on 1 September.
It feels great to be able to focus on idea development, innovation and entrepreneurship with students, researchers and new startups in Uminova Expression after a few intense years building up Sliperiet's business together with great colleagues - for me it's the dream job. We will continue to create many synergies in the building and become enormously strong together, an innovation center in Umeå that will stand out and be world-class.
Marlene Johansson received her PhD in Business Administration in 2012 from Umeå School of Business, Umeå University. Her current research interests include how companies develop their business models in innovation-driven industries, digital fabrication and how the growing 'maker movement' challenges the entrepreneurship field and drives a new form of innovation power, strategic alliances, and how innovation support systems can be developed to support academic start-ups in new industries. In her teaching at the School of Business, she has focused on entrepreneurship and business development. Her teaching efforts were awarded with both the Faculty of Social Sciences and the School of Business and Economics' teaching awards in 2010. Over the years, Marlene Johansson has run a number of collaborative projects, in Sliperiet with a focus on innovation and digital production, maker spaces, open innovation and co-creative design.
For further information, please contact:
Marlene Johansson
Telephone: 072-533 99 21
Agneta Marell, Chairman Uminova eXpression
Telephone: 070-207 20 02
