Faculty of Business and Economics

Second Responsible Innovation Summit 2023 on 30 June

Economic success as the basis for sustainable transformation


Valuable insights into their business activities were provided by alumni of the Faculty of Business and Economics at Georg-August Universität Göttingen at the Responsible Innovation Summit on 30 June 2023. After last year's successful premiere, the Faculty of Business and Economics hosted the conference for the second time in the Central Lecture Hall Building at Platz der Göttinger Sieben. The event took place in German.

The Responsible Innovation Summit is an alumni-sponsored event for companies, founders, scientists and students alike and is held under the motto of sustainable development and transformation. "Responsible Innovation", i.e. the idea of enlightened, responsible innovation activity by economic actors (individuals or organisations), forms the overarching guiding principle of the faculty in research and teaching.

After the opening address by University President Prof. Dr. Metin Tolan and Dean Prof. Dr. Matthias Schumann, Petra Scharner-Wolff outlined decisive transformation processes at the Otto Group in her keynote speech "Change is the new Normal - How cultural change makes organisations fit for the future". Scharner-Wolff is Group Executive for Finance, Controlling and Human Resources.

By describing the transition from catalogue mail order to e-commerce and the challenges posed by the Covid pandemic, she made it clear that a continuous process of change and a balance between individual optimisation and optimisation of the organisation are necessary for companies to be economically successful in the long term. "And companies need to be successfully manageable in the long term to enable sustainable transformation."

Muhamad Said Chahrour then gave interesting insights on how to successfully transform a business model in his presentation "From idea to market leadership: success factors and leadership challenges" and talked about what makes good leadership. Chahrour is Deputy Managing Director of flatex DEGIRO, the largest online broker in Europe. He also manages the operational business of the company.

In the eight workshops that followed, the participants discussed with the alumni and professors of the faculty, for example, the "Start-Up Ecosystem Göttingen", "Responsible Innovation in German Development Cooperation", "Sustainability between Reporting Obligations and Impact", "Sustainable Financial Innovations" or how AI and behavioural sciences can help to improve the sustainability of e-commerce. The workshops took place in three parallel sessions and were jointly organised by the academics and graduates.

The conference was concluded in the afternoon with a panel discussion on the topic of "Shaping the transformation processes of industries using the example of the mobility sector". The speakers discussed the challenges of transformations of entire industries using the example of the automotive industry and took up the topics discussed earlier in the day.

The panel consisted of:

  • Dr. Melanie Bockemühl, Investor, Strategic Advisor and Interim CEO at River22 Invest GmbH
  • Björn Korte, Head of Division Automotive, Aviation, Capital Goods Industry at the Ministry of Economics of Lower Saxony
  • Andreas Behrens, Founder YourCar
  • Dr. Björn Hinderlich, Senior Principal, Rewards & Leadership at MERCER


Further information about the programme and the speakers: https://ris-goettingen.de/ (in German)