Milena Leybold is an Assistant Professor at the Sustainable Transformation Management Lab of the Linz Institute for Transformative Change. Her research focuses on organizational openness, organizational boundaries, and how these are negotiated through communication; organizational processes and resistance on digital platforms; and strategic change processes in companies. Theoretically, her work is grounded mainly in communication, process, and practice perspectives, while empirically she employs qualitative research methods such as ethnography, netnography, and document analysis. During her position at the University of Innsbruck, Milena spent the last three years working on an FWF project focused on alternative approaches to intellectual property in the pharmaceutical industry. Since then, she has been investigating Open Science vaccine initiatives and patent pooling to explore the connection between open organizational forms and public health.

Milena completed a Bachelor's degree in Sociology and a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration at the University of Bamberg (Germany). For her Master's program in Organization Studies, she attended the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and spent one semester at Stockholm University (Sweden). She also pursued her PhD in Management at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). Supported by a Marietta-Blau Scholarship, Milena was a visiting scholar at the Department of Management, Society, and Communication at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) and at the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado, Boulder (USA).

Milena is an active member of the Strategy-as-Practice (SAP) and Communication-Constitutes-Organization (CCO) communities. She regularly organizes events to foster exchange between these two communities and is involved in the SAP Interest Group's social media team at the Academy of Management.