Strategic advice to leverage new technologies

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.

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.

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.

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 he 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.