About

Stefan Breet is an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Radboud University Nijmegen. He studies why some employees drive their organizations forward while others hold back, and finds that the answer often has less to do with individual talent than with social context.

Research

His work sits at the intersection of corporate entrepreneurship and social network analysis. The core argument across his research is that an employee’s position in the informal networks of their workplace shapes whether they will generate new ideas, push them upward, and see them through to implementation. Using survey-based data and formal network models, he examines the conditions that enable or suppress entrepreneurial behavior inside established organizations.

His PhD dissertation, completed at the Rotterdam School of Management (Erasmus University) in 2022, developed the NPCE framework: a theoretical model that maps the mechanisms through which workplace relationships influence the corporate entrepreneurship process. Subsequent work has extended this to team learning, post-merger behavior, remote work, and the conditions under which network closure becomes a ceiling rather than a resource for individual innovation.

Alongside his network research, he contributes to the development of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), a statistical method for identifying bottleneck conditions in causal research. He teaches NCA in workshops and intensive summer courses with Professor Jan Dul, the method’s founder.

A recent article in the European Management Journal (with Pursey Heugens and Anna Nadolska) reports a meta-analysis of 74 studies on organizational responses to performance shortfalls, showing that how firms respond to underperformance depends critically on whether they compare themselves to their own past or to their peers.

Consulting

Through Alter Analytics, he applies network science in practice. Alter Analytics is a consultancy specialising in organisational network analysis (ONA): the systematic study of how knowledge, trust, and collaboration actually flow through an organisation, as distinct from how formal structures suggest they should. Services range from focused network diagnostics and full research engagements to workshops and insight sessions for leadership and HR teams.

He founded Alter Analytics out of the conviction that organisations consistently underestimate the power of their informal networks. Org charts and reporting lines tell only part of the story; the real drivers of performance, innovation, and resilience are often invisible to leadership. Alter Analytics exists to make that hidden layer visible, and to help organisations act on what they find.

Teaching

At Radboud, he teaches corporate entrepreneurship, innovation management, and business model innovation at both bachelor and master level. His courses connect theoretical frameworks from strategy and entrepreneurship research to practical challenges facing managers in established firms.

Background

Stefan studied Business Administration at the University of Groningen before completing an MPhil in Business Research and a PhD at the Rotterdam School of Management. He was a visiting PhD candidate at the University of Kentucky in 2019 and a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney in late 2024. He has presented his work at the Academy of Management, EGOS, the Strategic Management Society, and SUNBELT, among others.