#1 Can Digital Innovations be Sustainable?

Last week I attended the Transformations Community Conference in Prague. It was extraordinary: Once, I visited this urban, green, and historic city for the first time. Furthermore, I exchanged ideas with scientists from all over the world about global transformation processes. The formats were interactive, and besides many cognitive topics also, bodywork and consciousness training were addressed.?

My three external collaborative Ph.D. students - Dilan ?zdemir-Kaluk , Cudi Zerey , and Stefan E. Slembrouck - and I facilitated a digital ideation workshop. Our vision was to offer a global program of study that trains Sustainable Digital Innovators (SDI). Our question was at the beginning and the end of the workshop what people from different contexts and nations mean by SDI. In between, we moved on to three breakouts. In these, we discussed the setting, the competencies, and the role models necessary in such a program. The discussions were lively and critical. Before the workshop, the participants considered digital collaboration tools for innovators when reflecting on SDI. After the workshop, there was an understanding that people create innovations in a digital world, solving societal problems. Those people (=SDIs) are self-motivated, reflective, creative, ethical, and empathetic. They follow a holistic and discovering view.??

One question that stuck in my mind from Francesca - one of the participants - was, "Can digital innovation ever be fully sustainable?". Yes, and this question is justified. We need rare earths for hardware components and establishing internet connections enabling digital solutions. The question now is, how could the sustainability percentage of a digital solution or even innovation be quantified? What should be in-/excluded in the calculation? Are we talking about the entire value chain or just operations? Are we discussing the offering per company or the ecosystem, such as the required infrastructure and hardware? Are there sustainable innovations? Furthermore, if so, what exactly is sustainable about digital innovations??

These are precisely the questions we will address in the following newsletters.?

Our focus will be on

1. approaches that help to make the sustainability of digital solutions transparent and calculable,
2. digital innovations that have been designed and created sustainably,
3. digital innovations that are operated sustainably, and
4. skills needed to create sustainable digital innovations.

We will discuss solutions, processes, organizations, and business models. My interest lies in particular in AI-based applications.

Happy reading,

Prof. Dr. Sabrina Schork