In his article, Noah Barsky explores the criticality of financial insight and responsibility. Timely and timeless financial acumen is as crucial as ever in the digital era, as it can quickly reveal which enterprises are, in reality, only technologies in search of a sustainable business model. Despite the fluid and fleeting lexicon of business buzzwords, leaders of well-run organizations honor fiscal stewardship, deliver competitive returns, and communicate with clarity and candor.

Part II of this Advisor series on change management focuses on the critical role of a reimagined change management office (CMO) in driving successful digital transformations. It examines the CMO’s solution catalog, levels of program engagement, and essential enablers for effective change management, offering actionable insights to enhance organizational adaptability and transformation outcomes.

Part II of this Advisor series on change management focuses on the critical role of a reimagined change management office (CMO) in driving successful digital transformations. It examines the CMO’s solution catalog, levels of program engagement, and essential enablers for effective change management, offering actionable insights to enhance organizational adaptability and transformation outcomes.

In this Advisor, we explore how AI tools are transforming sustainable agriculture by integrating with traditional farming practices. Through three case studies, we highlight how farms are leveraging AI for disease detection, weather prediction, and crop management while addressing challenges such as infrastructure gaps and community skepticism. By blending technology with local knowledge, these farms demonstrate pathways to achieving climate-resilient and sustainable agricultural outcomes.

In this Advisor, CIOs highlight the importance of IT projects that, while lacking direct business impact, deliver critical strategic benefits such as resource optimization, technical debt reduction, and infrastructure support. They discuss the challenges of managing ROI in environments constrained by limited resources, emphasizing the CIO’s role in balancing cost-efficiency with human impact and explore the often-overlooked accountability of reallocating resources to higher-impact projects, reinforcing the broader value IT contributes to organizational goals.

Armand Smits, an assistant professor of organizational change and design at Radboud University, the Netherlands, tackles one of the most pressing issues in digital sustainability: the rising energy and environmental cost of data centers. Digital sustainability approaches and AI rely on large amounts of data that are increasing exponentially and must be stored and processed in data centers. Smits provides a deep dive into the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) to help managers and policymakers understand how to limit the environmental impact of data centers.

Angela Greco, assistant professor of innovation management at TU Delft, and Andrea Kerstens, a TNO scientist and PhD candidate in innovation management at TU Delft, draw on their experience with Syn.ikia, an EU-funded Innovation Living Lab for positive-energy building districts that leverage energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. Digital innovations like digital twins have been essential to unlocking positive-energy districts. For instance, digital twins that combine physical models of buildings and AI models of user behavior allow building districts to predict and optimize usage of excess solar energy. Their article presents three lessons learned from the project.

This issue of Amplify, the second in a two-part series, offers another set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. The authors reiterate the core message of this Amplify series: digital innovation can accelerate climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this double issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

Led by Hamdy Abdelaty, a high-profile team of researchers at the Lusastia Energy Innovation Center (EIZ) at Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, shares insights about the role of digital innovation in facilitating energy innovation. The article focuses on Lusatia, a German region historically reliant on lignite (brown coal) for energy, and its ongoing transformation under Germany’s ambitious Energiewende policy, which aims for climate neutrality by 2045.

Diaa Shalghin, an emerging thought leader on building information management (BIM) in Germany and currently senior BIM manager at DEGES, teams up with Winfried Heusler of the Detmold School of Design, Germany, previously senior VP of engineering and building excellence at Schüco. The authors apply a digitally enabled, digital-first framework to explore the opportunity of enhancing lifecycle assessment through digital innovation and present three takeaways: (1) implement a digital-first sustainability strategy for improved environmental simulation and modeling through BIM; (2) leverage digitally enabled sustainability for environmental data collection and analysis through the Internet of Things; and (3) combine digitally enabled and digital-first sustainability strategies for continuous optimization through AI.

Drawing from their rich expertise in real estate, housing management, urban planning, and innovation, Brian van Laar, Angela Greco, Hilde Remøy, Vincent Gruis, and Mohammad Hamida explore the concept of adaptive reuse, which involves repurposing buildings to extend their lifespan and can drastically cut emissions in the built environment. However, implementing and scaling adaptive reuse is challenging. The decision-making process is often top-down and fails to capture relevant voices and make compromises acceptable to all stakeholders. AI might come to the rescue as it enables new visualization tools to unite stakeholders.

Bill Fox, founder of LeaderONE.org and Forward Thinking Workplaces, emphasizes that true leadership transcends titles and is rooted in authenticity and conscious awareness. The inner leadership journey shifts from ego-driven action to being, unlocking profound personal and organizational transformation essential for today’s leaders.

Healthcare and pharma are embracing a data revolution, powered by wearables, AI, and genomics/precision medicine. These technologies drive efficiency, precision, and innovation, but their true value depends on aligning outcomes with stakeholder needs. This Advisor explores how data-driven decision-making, value-based metrics, and emerging technologies are transforming healthcare services.

In Part I of this three-part Advisor series on change management, we lay out the challenges associated with change in digital transformations and explore an innovative CMO solution to those challenges that leverages data analytics and GenAI.

This Advisor explores the Digital Trust Transformative Market (DTTM) model, which offers a robust solution to the challenges faced by traditional agri-food supply chains. DTTM leverages blockchain technology to foster trust among supply chain actors and enables the creation of dynamic, efficient, sustainable supply chains.

In this Advisor, bestselling author Philippa White stresses that business is at an inflection point: the power is shifting into the hands of customers and employees, and there is a competitive urgency to create spaces and cultures where people want to work. The leaders who can do this will win; these leaders put human values like kindness, empathy, vulnerability, imagination, creativity, and courage first.

Pieter Waller, cofounder and previous chief commercial officer of Chargetrip, a leading start-up in the smart electric vehicle routing space, takes us on a journey to scale e-mobility through digital solutions. Focusing on the electrification of commercial fleets, he unpacks the multitude of constraints that complicate e-mobility scaling. Waller then provides clear managerial guidance on how to manage these constraints. Similar to the challenge in the general electricity system, the task of matching supply and demand through data must be the guiding mantra. Furthermore, companies must design a technology stack that is open to integration and allows for the coordination of multiple actors through APIs. Finally, Waller explains that given the differences in regulations and local conditions across countries and locations, a flexible and bottom-up approach to piloting and scaling smart-charging and routing applications is the key to success.

In a thought-provoking article on the butterfly effect of AI, Jonatan Pinkse, professor of sustainable business and director of the Centre for Sustainable Business at King’s College London, teamed up with René Bohnsack, professor at Católica Lisbon School of Business & Economics, Portugal, where she also heads the Digital+Sustainable Innovation Lab. Since “seemingly harmless” AI applications can have adverse effects on the environment and society at large, they present a comprehensive framework for wisely managing AI for sustainability. Managers must control AI’s training data, the optimization drivers and parameters in AI algorithms, and the decisions taken based on training data and algorithms with potential biases. The authors demonstrate that successfully managing unintended consequences requires continually monitoring, measuring, modeling, and managing AI applications for sustainability.

Jannis Jehmlich, a senior product manager from 1KOMMA5, the German unicorn that set out to digitally transform the energy industry, provides a deep dive into the load management problem that comes with the integration of renewable energy sources into our energy systems. Because large-scale integration of renewables is probably the most important challenge for emission reductions, digital innovation can play a huge role. Jehmlich walks us through the complex supply and demand dynamics in Germany’s energy systems and introduces the idea of a digital power economy driven by real-time data and a dynamic electricity tariff that can solve the load management problem. However, this envisioned digital power economy depends on comprehensive data gathering through smart meters, enhanced data processing capabilities, and synchronous regulation and process changes in a heavily regulated industry.

Christina Bidmon, Laura Piscicelli, and Iryna Susha, along with Devin Diran, Francesca Ciulli, and Albert Meijer provide four core messages. First, that a successful twin transition requires rigorous conceptual and empirical research that provides us with the tools and insights to help navigate the complexities of the transition. Remarkably, the second core message entails a warning to stay clear of tech optimism, which speaks directly to issues related to unintended consequences. Digital innovation can be the key to sustainability but will not solve all our problems — often, other approaches and nature-based solutions should be prioritized. Third, Bidmon et al. highlight the need to understand the factors that facilitate or prevent collaboration for digital sustainability. Finally, the authors point out that neither policies nor businesses can achieve the twin transition alone; rather, comprehensive policies are needed to provide smart incentives for businesses to engage responsibly.

Aspen Institute Fellow Alessia Falsarone sheds light on an often-overlooked aspect of digital sustainability: the digital talent needed to manage digital sustainability solutions. Unlocking the benefits of digital sustainability and managing its unintended consequences requires the right digital talent. Falsarone’s best practices for growing the talent pool for digital climate transformations include: (1) identifying climate-resilience skills and capabilities, (2) leveraging collaborative tools and research for learning, and (3) embracing AI and feedback for advancement. Finally, going beyond the perspective of a single firm, she presents best practices for building and leveraging stakeholder networks for digital talent: leveraging living laboratories, fostering diverse networks, and championing collaborative initiatives.

Damla Diriker and Amanda J. Porter team up with Ilse Hellemans from the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) to show how we can use digital innovation for mission-oriented innovation policies. Based on several years of research and practice, they present crowdsourcing as a vehicle for mission-oriented policies. The ability of digital innovation to leverage the “wisdom of the crowd” facilitates policy agenda-setting because it allows initial broad exploration and refinement into sub-challenges. It also promotes solution development through targeted experimentation and broadens the scope of experimentation. Finally, it facilitates policy implementation by collecting local insights on planned interventions and testing and gathering feedback on implementing interventions.

This issue of Amplify offers a set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. They share a common message: digital innovation can be the key to accelerated climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

Farmers, commodities suppliers, investors, and governments are well aware of the need for innovation to support more sustainable practices and protect scarce agricultural resources. However, due to the complexity and individuality of farming systems, knowing what tech to invest in and under what circumstances is a significant challenge. As this Advisor explores, recent advances in AI can support these innovation decisions and provide information on the broader direction of relevant emerging technologies.

People understand what character is and why it matters but not what it takes to cultivate the habits associated with character. Without this understanding, efforts to elevate character to achieve competitive advantage at either the individual or organizational level will be compromised. As this Advisor explores, character must be embedded and institutionalized across the organization to reach its full strategic impact.