Andy Buschmann

Andy Buschmann is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He studies how organizations survive and thrive in extremely uncertain environments, whether the source of uncertainty is political or technological. As part of this broad agenda, he also examines innovation performance at multiple levels of analysis, including firms, technologies, and countries. In his dissertation, he develops a new measure of internet-based innovation and shows that it is not merely a complement to traditional indicators such as patents or new product introductions. Instead, he finds that internet innovation often flourishes in less-than-optimal environments characterized by ‘bad’ governance and a lack of resources, and that it is more resilient to negative shocks, including wars and military coups, than other forms of innovation. In his ongoing work on the Space Economy, he shows how misaligned innovation policies can hinder the development of nascent technology markets, and in related work with Prof. Breznitz, he argues that ‘equitable representation in the production of innovation’ offers both normative and functional benefits to society at large by up-skilling human capital and addressing innovation-led inequality. Buschmann and Breznitz (2025) argue that to achieve equitable representation, governments can devise various ‘representation-sensitive innovation policies’. Before joining Michigan, he completed an MSc in Politics Research at the University of Oxford, a BSc in Management at TU Berlin, and a BA in Social Sciences at Humboldt University Berlin. As part of his education, he studied and worked abroad in Hong Kong and London, and conducted extensive fieldwork in Myanmar and across Southeast Asia.