Research interests: cooperative and community initiatives, institutional theory, market categorization, organizational forms, platform economy

Matthijs Punt is an assistant professor at the Innovation Studies group. His interests are directed towards the interdependency between inventions and institutions, with a specific focus on innovation that is predominately institutional, and not so much technological, in nature. As such, he is particularly interested in the emergence and life-cycle dynamics of new organizational forms, drawing on institutional theory and organizational ecology.

One of the empirical contexts he studies is digital platforms, where technological novelty is often limited, while it requires drastic re-thinking of our existing institutions or even introduces very new institutions. Within this context, Matthijs has studied how platforms diffuse across both geographically and sectorally separated markets. Currently, he is also co-supervising two PhD students (external at Nijmegen School of Management) on the unfolding of the platform-based gig economy in national labor markets, from the perspective of gig providers¹ and the gig platforms.

Another of Matthijs' contexts of study is community-driven initiatives or enterprises, such as cooperatives. Within this context, he studies what explains the emergence and demise of energy cooperatives. As part of his involvement in this research area, he is also involved as one of the executive core members of the interdisciplinary research platform Bottom-up Initiatives for Societal Change at UU's strategic theme Institutions for Open Societies (IOS). Furthermore, he is co-supervising a PhD-student³ (external at Ruralia Institute of the University of Helsinki) on a project (STRAWOCO) the organization and management of worker cooperatives. 

Before joining the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development. Matthijs worked and studied at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, where he completed an MSc in Sociology of Culture, Media and the Arts.

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