Advisor

Malni Kumarathunga, Athula Ginige

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.

Advisor

Philippa White

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.

Article

Pieter Waller

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.

Article

Jonatan Pinkse, René Bohnsack

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.

Article

Jannis Jehmlich

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.

Article

Christina Bidmon, Laura Piscicelli, Iryna Susha

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.

Article

Alessia Falsarone

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.

Article

Damla Diriker, Amanda Porter, Ilse Hellemans

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.

Article

Lukas Falcke

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.

Advisor

Curt Hall

This Advisor provides an overview of how AI-powered platforms are radically transforming wildlife conservation and explores key application domains and use cases. These technologies also facilitate greater collaboration among the global conservation community.

Advisor

Philip Webster, Habib Hussein, Kajetan Widomski, Jonathan Jeyaratnam, Ruth Bastow, Mark Matthews

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.

Advisor

Corey Crossan, Mary Crossan, Bill Furlong

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.

Advisor

Martin Dix, Oliver Golly

Europe has an urgent need to decarbonize, but its progress lags other regions, including the US, Australia, and Japan. This Advisor examines the current state of carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies in Europe and explains how some countries are increasing their carbon-capture capacities.

Advisor

Bill Schmarzo

In this Advisor, data and AI innovation strategist Bill Schmarzo introduces a collaborative, design-centric, human-empowered framework that can help organizations leverage AI to create new sources of customer, product, service, and operational value.

Advisor

William Spangler

This Advisor presents results from a recent study that investigates how humility and narcissism affect CEO behavior. With a sample of 190 CEOs and data collected from interviews and public sources, the author introduces a set of diverse CEO archetypes by measuring humility, narcissism, and entrepreneurial status.

Advisor

Christian Müller, Jochen Gönsch, Louisa Albrecht, Max Staskiewicz

To illustrate the benefits of our dynamic pricing approach over other benchmarks, we carried out several computational studies and a case study using Share Now data from the city of Vienna, Austria. As this Advisor explores, that approach outperforms all benchmarks, saves providers operational costs, and improves sustainability via clear decarbonization benefits.

Article

Ananthi Al Ramiah, Gretchen Reydams Schils, Matthew Phillips

Ananthi Al Ramiah, Gretchen Reydams-Schils, and Matthew Phillips focus on the crisis of purpose within professions. Premised on purpose to begin with, many professions are struggling with inner distress and outer distrust. Instead of taking purpose for granted, the authors invite professionals to work on it by employing four Stoic virtues (wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance). Quoting philosopher Christopher Gill, who describes virtue as “expertise in leading a happy life,” the authors encourage purpose-driven professionals to reimagine themselves at the center of circles opening up to progressively widening communities, so they can ask how to take setbacks seriously, defy indifference, and reify the joy of tackling what matters most.

Article

Andriy Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Opatska, Gerard Seijts

Andriy Rozhdestvensky, Sofiya Opatska, and Gerard Seijts (coauthor of Character: What Contemporary Leaders Can Teach Us About Building a More Just, Prosperous, and Sustainable Future) move us to extraordinary purpose, counting up to the 1,000 days of Ukraine’s resistance to the 2022 Russian invasion. “How can societal leaders come to terms with the damage inflicted on them and then make the substantive shift of returning to a peacetime leadership approach equipped to rebuild and regenerate the country?” the authors ask. The article features hard-won insights from five resilient Ukrainian leaders (from parliament, the armed forces, church, business, the not-for-profit sector, and academia) who open up about their journey to, and undeniable power of, existential purpose.

Article

Christian Busch, Nele Marie Terveen

Christian Busch, author of The Serendipity Mindset: The Art and Science of Creating Good Luck, and Nele Terveen explain how purpose helps leaders connect the dots between grand challenges and strategic responses. When leaders expect the unexpected, the authors explain, they incent their stakeholders to embrace uncertainty so they can better guide their organizations through adversity and disruption. By leveraging the five practices of Serendipitous Impact (impact mission, impact leadership, impact governance, impact networks, and impact measurement) unexpected events can help leaders come up with solutions that often cannot be seen, let alone fully defined, in advance.

Article

Frank Jan de Graaf

Frank Jan de Graaf invites us to try on deliberative practices. Firmly rooted in pragmatism, deliberation has historically played a significant (some say central) role in democratic societies. It also comes in handy when opposite perspectives invite us to summon new ways to converse about issues that matter — but matter differently to each of us. Rather than bracing against those who don’t share a particular purpose, de Graaf advocates for open dialogue, so we begin to look beyond the current divides and discover integrative ways to develop new rules of engagement, frame new responsibilities, and discover new solutions.