The Sustainability Imperative

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.

This Advisor builds on our previous discussion about AI’s transformative role in wildlife conservation and research. It delves into the development of AI applications and highlights key AI models such as CNNs, SVMs, and random forests. These technologies enhance efforts in species identification, habitat monitoring, and biodiversity tracking, driving global collaboration and more effective conservation strategies.

This Advisor suggests a new framework for incorporating corporate responsibility into product design; its categories include equity and justice, transparency, health and safety impacts, circularity, and climate and ecosystem impacts. This method results in an inclusive design process that embodies corporate responsibility.

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.