Dr Ulrike Tagscherer

Ulrike Tagscherer is Chief Innovation Officer (CINO) of KUKA AG, driving future business initiatives for the Group since 2019. She has established herself as a transformation champion and drives strategic efforts in digitalization and sustainability for KUKA. Before joining KUKA, she spent 17 years at Fraunhofer. She held different roles to Regional Director Business Development Asia in the headquarter, before moving into innovation system research for one of the institutes. From 2008 to 2013 she worked as innovation researcher in a first-of-a-kind arrangement integrating a foreign national into the Chinese entity in a politically high-level institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). From 2013 to 2015, she headed the Joint Center for Innovation Research between Fraunhofer and CAS as Director and Senior Scientist in China. After moving back to Germany in 2015 she led a Fraunhofer internal start-up accelerator programme to support Fraunhofer researchers to build their own start-up. She currently holds a NED position at the Wissenschaftsstatistik gGmbh of the Stifterverband and advices the President of acatech in international topics.