Joan Ernst van Aken is professor (em) of Organization Science. His chair was at Eindhoven University of Technology, department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences. While at the TU/e his research interests were innovation management, organization design, domain independent design theory, the methodology of practice oriented research in the social world and approaches to bridge the great Divide between theory and practice in the field of Organization and Management. Nowadays his research interests are the further development and dissemination of the methodologies of Design Science Research and Evidence-Based Practice and their use in actual field projects.
He holds an MSc in Applied Physics from Delft University of Technology, he obtained during his military service at the Dutch Naval Academy (teaching naval cadets physics and doing some research on naval weapons) a BA in Economics and he got his PhD from Eindhoven University of Technology on the thesis ‘On the Control of Complex Industrial Organizations’(1978), written in the period he was working for Royal Philips Electronics (Philips).
After his graduation from Delft he worked for some twenty years for Philips, at first in Operations research, later in Logistics Management and finally as a consultant and as a manager of (internal) consultants in the field of Organization and Management. His last function in practice was divisional manager of Organization & Management and of Quality Management for one of the divisions of Philips.
In 1990 he was appointed a full professor in Organization Science at Eindhoven University of Technology in the department of Technical Business Administration. After his formal retirement from the chair of Organization Science in 2007 he was for three years director of research of the Dutch Military Academy (NLDA, comprising all military branches of The Netherlands).
He has been a member of the Board of the Dutch Society of Management Consultants and Organization Scientists (Ooa), President of the Dutch Academy of Management (NOBEM) and a member of the Council of the International Federation of Scholarly Societies on Management (IFSAM).