 Welcome to this panel. I would like to start and introduce myself. My name is Maike Gossen. I'm a postdoc researcher at the Technical University in Berlin. And I did my PhD on sufficiency-oriented marketing. So my own background fits quite well to this panel's topic. And the panel is about transformative, sustainable business models. It's quite new and pioneering what we are doing here today at this conference, because it's the first time that the Bits and Boymer has a track on the economic perspective and business models. There are more people joining us, and I'm happy to have you here at this pioneering or with this pioneering topic. I think we all agree that companies are responsible for achieving the sustainability transformation. And today we will do a deep dive into successful strategies but also into challenges these business models face. And I have the honor to discuss these and further questions with the panel, so experts from research, from science, but also an expert from practice. And I think it's no surprise which company is here today with us and will present its business model and experience with transforming the economy. With this, I would like to introduce Christian Kroll. He's the founder of Ecosia. Please come to the stage. Christian launched Ecosia in 2009 after a year-long trip around the world to help people in developing countries and to do something about climate change. The Berlin-based search engine now has more than 100 employees and millions of users enabling the company to plant a tree every second. He will tell us what Ecosia does for social and environmental sustainability, how it came about, and what challenges he has encountered in founding a green search engine. I'm happy to have you here. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I'm super happy to speak at this conference because when I saw the conference for the first time, Bits and Boymer, I thought, well, trees or bits and trees, that's basically the shortest possible summary of what we're doing at Ecosia. So yeah, super happy to contribute to this as well. Just for those who haven't used Ecosia yet, a quick summary of what we're doing. So Ecosia is just a normal search engine. You can search for everything you want to. And like other search engines, we show you advertisements next to the search results. And when you click on those advertisements, then we make money. So until here, everything is exactly the same as with our big competitors. The big difference though is that we use that money to finance reforestation projects across the world. So what we're basically doing is we're transforming a landscape, like you can see here on the left, into a functioning ecosystem again. So, and that has a lot of advantages. First of all, we're paying people money so that they can do the regeneration of the land. Then they can also earn income later on from those trees that they have planted. The soil gets fertile again, biodiversity gets a boost. The water cycle is reestablished. There are a lot of miracles happening if you plant the right trees in the right place. And that's what we're trying to do. And one important aspect, of course, is that trees are extremely good at absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. So we've calculated that every search with Ecosia absorbs around 1.5 kilogram of CO2. If you have a rough, I mean, understanding of what usually using the internet causes in terms of CO2 emissions, it's kind of fractions of a gram usually. If you do a search or watch a video, for example, so 1.5 kilogram in the positive direction is really, really a lot. So yeah, that's what Ecosia is all about. We've planted 150, actually this is from last week. Now it's 159 million trees so far, have 20 million users, are Berlin's biggest website. Actually, so that's a lot of people bigger than Zalando or SoundCloud, for example, in terms of traffic. And also Europe's biggest search engine, which is a little bit sad because we only have 1% market share, but still quite an accomplishment. And most of all, we're really financing the transformation of a lot of degraded land on our planet and that lets a lot of people benefit in really, really big ways. So this is also where my passion came from, helping people and also solving the climate crisis. We are also super transparent. So this is basically just a screenshot that I took from our website. So everybody can see this. So we are very clear about how much money we earn, what we put into tree planting, also which projects our tree planting money goes to. So you could even call those projects if you don't believe us and actually some journalists are even doing that. And also what other types of costs we have for marketing operations and so on. And yeah, as you can see in this chart, we're also paying taxes, which is not a normal thing for search engines to do. So that's also something we're proud of, contributing to our society. Then one thing that I wanted to point out because often people ask, yeah, but you're also using electricity, that is true, but we're generating all this electricity with renewable energy plants that we've built ourselves. And actually we're not only generating the electricity, we're consuming, but we're generating actually much, much more than that. So last year we were on average at 300%. So generating, pushing dirty energy out of the grid by using our search engine. And I think that mindset shift of not just trying to have zero footprint or being CO2 neutral, but actually trying to do a lot of good is actually what I think really distinguishes Ecosia from other types of companies. So we're not only trying to, let's say follow the minimal approach where we're trying to do no harm or not have any negative effect, but we're really trying to follow a maximum approach where we want to regenerate the planet as much as we can do. So our house is on fire and we're not only, I don't know, trying to put, so like many other companies not trying to add more fire, but our goal is really to extinguish the fire. And we're giving all our best to achieve that. One other thing that I want to point out about Ecosia is when I started the company 2009, a while ago, I basically promised our first employees, but also our users that I would never take any profit out of the company and that I would never sell the company. And we actually, in 2018, we made that legally binding. You might have heard about Patagonia recently announcing that they basically given away their company to foundation so that it cannot be acquired or they can't take any profits out of the company. So if we have the same solution since 2018, and that also means that Ecosia will always be independent. So even if Google, Microsoft, or Amazon came tomorrow and wanted to buy the company, it would just not be possible. And that's something that's super important for me and also, of course, for our employees and users as well. So that's my normal pitch about Ecosia and what we're doing and why we're awesome. But then I also added a few slides for, I think, this particular group because it's basically trying to dive a little bit deeper into what else can a search engine do to actually have a positive effect on the climate apart from giving away all your money for tree planting. And there are a few things that might be interesting for a few people here as well. So what we've been working on quite a bit actually is to really make our search results greener as well. And there was also, there's a funding project that Mike is also involved in with, together with Technical University and BTHA. So in this project, we basically aim to not only provide green information on the website, but also try to change user behavior towards a more climate friendly behavior. So their first things, small things that we're doing for example, we're highlighting good websites on our search results page. So this little green leaf, I hope you can see it. For example, putting that near Patagonia search results, but we're also highlighting bad ones actually. And then we are every now and then we are showing additional climate information like if you're looking up a country, then you can see for example that Morocco is currently on track to a two degree future, which is not perfect, but better than Germany. So those types of information we're providing. And then we are even going a few steps further when it comes to shopping. So there we actually invested a lot of resources in for quite a few categories. We're providing basically always the greenest alternative. And that has been a lot of research by a lot of people involved basically finding the best practice. And as you can see, it's not some kind of filter that you'd have to activate, but it's actually something that pops up automatically. So if you're shopping on Ecosia, if you go to the shopping tab and type in iPhone, for example, we actually show you a fair phone. So that, yeah, trying to nudge people into at least looking at those alternatives. And then, yeah, I mean, trying to shift consumer behavior, but also giving more awareness what people could do with their consumption decisions. Another thing I pointed out that we are also highlighting bad ones, but this is what we are doing more and more, even also for good companies is adding climate ratings for those companies. And we've already received some very harsh feedback from those companies that they don't agree, but this is based on external data. So it's not us saying that Amazon is not good in terms of climate, it's external data, pointing that out and we can then basically say to those companies, yeah, complain over there and how about you just deliver more and then you probably get a better rating as well. So we realize that providing this type of information really influences or at least triggers questions. And that is why we're really investing into that. It's also like here a few features that I want to point out. So if somebody's looking for a flight to Barcelona, for example, then we're also trying to nudge them in like one of the results you can see over there is a train Berlin to Barcelona. I mean, it's a little bit ambitious, but why not? Or at least people really understand how bad flying actually is because what you should show as a climate conscious search engine in this for this type of search query, you should basically tell people, do you really have to take that flight? It's really, really bad for the climate, better don't. And we're doing that because, let me quickly go to this slide, because our mission is to solve the climate crisis. So we're not optimizing necessarily for profit. Of course, we have to make money, we have to be profitable. But when we realize that we actually have a very bad impact with our search results, then we really consider if we shouldn't kind of show other type of information. And that we would even do if it would mean that we would earn less revenue. And this is exactly what basically the big players are not doing yet. I mean, they're doing a little bit of green information here and there, but actually none of them really harm their profitability. So there was, I think a few weeks ago, there was an article or various articles about Google's flight information and how they are basically under-estimating, vastly under-estimating carbon emissions. And also, if you look at Google's design, like it doesn't really keep you from flying. I mean, you feel a little bit aware that flying causes carbon emissions, but what does it mean if there is something written like 200 kilograms of CO2? And then even in green letters, ah, by the way, this is 20% less than what you would normally emit. That's maybe nice information, but it doesn't keep you from flying. And that's, I think, the important point there. So what we can do with our mission to solve the climate crisis is basically make those decisions and really potentially not make revenue if we feel that it's better for the climate. So yeah, one thing that I want to point out, I'm not sure, maybe some of you are in some ways involved in projects that could be relevant for this, I don't know. But we have Ruben, who's working at Ecosia, who was also at TU for a while, and he's basically our product manager and sustainability lead, who, so his role is basically to try to find all green information that we could use and then see how we can include that into Ecosia's product offering. So if you have any well-structured green data or great ideas how we could make green products, please write to Ruben. Yeah, and if you're somehow working at a university or involved at a university, then my second request would be to please ask them to make Ecosia their standard search engine. So I think that's it from my side. You stop my 10 minutes, I think. Thank you very much. Thank you, Christian, for this inspiring talk. And we now have about 10 minutes time for Q&A. So while you are thinking about your question to Christian, I will raise my first question to you. I'm quite convinced from the idea to become a purpose company and I would like to learn more about it. So how did you came this idea about what challenges did you face? How do you think this could transform the economy? Yeah, this indeed, I think it could be a vast difference. So what do you mean by purpose company? I think it's this promise that we will not sell the company and not take any profit out. There is, I would say a movement of companies that we call the purpose movement. So we've done this 2018 and since then quite a lot of companies have done the same. Now also Patagonia, which will I think be a good contribution to that as well. And I personally think that this is something that is super necessary. So if I look back the last 30, 40 years, we as a society, we have very much been on the neoliberal kind of shareholder value approach in that corner. So it didn't really matter what your employees, if your employees are happy or if the planet is doing well, as long as you're making profit, you're as a company, you are doing well. And I think it needs a different type of company. I think in the end, we need a social and ecological transformation and I'm a big fan of the social market economy that we have in Germany that I hope will turn into a social ecological market economy. And for that it needs different types of businesses that are aware of their responsibility. And what really helps is if a business doesn't have to basically maximize just for profit but can basically take a lot of factors into account. And what we are making sure with our model is that profit doesn't really matter. So you can, as a company, you can completely reprioritize your decisions. So you can say, our priority is to do as much as possible for solving the climate crisis. There's no rule in Germany that you can't do that as a company, but unfortunately 99.9% of the companies focus on maximizing profit. Well, at least the big companies, the publicly listed companies. So yeah, and I think we are maybe on one end on the other end of the spectrum while the shareholder value maximization spectrum is the opposite of us. And probably we need a lot of companies or in between. And I think, I mean, I studied business administration and nobody told me that a company can, you can start a company to just have a positive impact on the world. So I learned that companies exist to make shareholders money. And if somebody had told me at a new university, I might have figured that out earlier. So yeah, I think it's super important that, I mean, we and other companies are doing that as well so that more founders can potentially do the same. And especially young founders, I see a lot at least considering this model. Yeah. And your stuff and your users do like this. Definitely, yeah. So are there any questions in the audience for Christian? Where's the mic? Do you have, yeah, you already have one. So please use it. Yeah, thanks very inspiring presentation again. I wonder, what do you think are the main reasons that keep other bigger established companies from following that example, apart from not being told at university? Yeah, I think it's, I mean, in the United States, you're even forced to maximize for shareholder value. So you're basically forced to be a source of path. So if you look at that way, and that is a big problem, I think. I mean, if you talk to CEOs at big companies and I have a lot of respect for CEOs at big companies who are trying to make the transformation to become more climate friendly, a lot of them will tell you I can only do what this doesn't harm profit, what doesn't harm shareholder value. I would like to do more, but I can't really. And that's a shame. So I mean, fortunately, we're more and more moving into a direction where the most profitable path is actually also the climate friendly path. But for a very long time and still in many areas, those are actually opposite. So sometimes you need to make sacrifices. And there's this theory about externalities that you don't really have to pay for as a company. So for a long time, you didn't even have to pay for the CO2 emissions or the environmental damages or any types of negative effects you had on society. And if you don't have to pay for those, then the company who harms our planet is the financially more successful company that can, in the worst case, even take over the good ones and then transform them into bad companies. And that model is what's running our society, unfortunately. So yeah, I think we really need to reconsider that model and at least really change rules, change incentives that any company, I mean, I think any company should have a positive effect on the planet. It shouldn't like this ambition of trying to be carbon neutral by 2050 or something like that. It's just ridiculous. Like that's what a lot of companies are saying, but this is just way, way too little. And also if you look at the big tech companies who have hundreds of billions of euros or dollars lying around in their bank account, they could finance the entire energy transition on our planet. They're not doing anything. And they're doing roughly 0% of what they could be doing. I recently made a post about that. And somebody from Google got very offended about that. But that's really what I think. If they change their model, if they went away from this idea of, I have to maximize the dividends that I pay to shareholders and really start acting like they lived on this planet, then I think the world would be very different. And especially now with this crisis, like our houses on fire, we have to extinguish the fire in the next five years. At least for the next five years, really, really change the mindset there. And then maybe we can, yeah. Then we have a bit more time to figure out this problem because I think it's really a long-term problem that companies are not really part of society. More questions up there? I will come with a microphone. And if you like, you can introduce yourself just quickly with your name and your answer. Hi, my name is Alessa. Thank you for your presentation. And I actually wrote down Search Engine versus Activist or Engaging Software Tool with the question mark for myself to do research on it. And I was wondering how you do iterate your way of adding those engaging green things as, for example, the flight Berlin Barcelona transition to maybe taking a train. How do you iterate on that from a user experience or service design perspective? And do you? Or what makes you not caring about the results then? Maybe because results would maybe tell you to do something different regarding your increase of users. But yeah, how do you work with that? Thanks for the question. So yeah, I mean, we do a lot of standard practices when it comes to software development. So we do a beta and see if click behavior changes. And then I think in general, also just try to follow an agile approach. So we also developed a lot of features that we released at some point. But then notice this isn't really something that users want. One of those things were that if you were like, we developed a browser extension that was giving you recommendations while you're browsing. And basically, we're trying, if somebody wanted to buy a product that was not green on Amazon, for example, we told them, hey, go buy the green product on another website. And that was just too much for users, I think, to accept. So we have to be careful to take our users with us. I mean, ideally, of course, we want to go to the perfect solution right away. But often, like small nudges in the beginning are probably the better solution. Because we also don't want to use our users. I mean, lose our users. I'm sorry, very funny. And that, yeah, so there are quite a few things that we developed and then put away. But the other things, we try to have a rough estimate on what is the CO2 effect of us doing that feature. We picked the features that have the highest CO2 effect because we could do hundreds of things. So we looked at categories like clothing, for example, hardware, so also where we have good information available and where the CO2 effect is very big. Yeah, and then room here is making prioritization decisions together with our project partners. That's the, did that more or less answer the question? Yes? OK, I think we have time for one more question. And I saw you up there. And I think Christian will be around after this panel. So if you have more questions. Hi, I'm Alejandro from Spain. I have a few questions. How much does Secosia base for every tree which plants? Yes, do you want to ask all of them? So we do step by step. No, it's good, but then I'll answer now. So on average, I think we're at around 35 cent now per surviving tree. So that means we're planting a lot more trees than we actually show on our tree counter because we only count the ones that are surviving. Another one is, is Secosia planning to create a quality level, green quality kind of related to this way of advertisement green products on the website? Is plan to go beyond this market strategy? So if we plan to have green advertisement, was that no question? No? If you plan to create a green stamp, quality stamp, kind of label, quality label for green products or green processes. I mean, we're trying, but as Ruben would say, it's really difficult to have good data on all of those. So I mean, what we're trying with those types of things, we like if we have good data on phone providers, for example, then we would put a label there. But putting a really green layer on the entire internet is something that is super challenging that I hope Google would do. But yeah, not yet. Sorry, what I'm referring is like, for instance, these smartphones, if when they will be selling, it will be anyhow somehow the Cosia brand on it or the Cosia label. OK, if we have our go beyond the website. It's not really planned. I mean, we've done a few, we've helped a few startups to basically launch their own services. But yeah, running a search engine with 100 people is, while Google has, I think, 170,000 is quite a challenge already. So we're careful of what else we're taking on. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of opportunities. We're working with other companies together. I think that approach suits us more. And sometimes we're even launching or helping to launch other services if we see an opportunity. So sometimes even working with young founders there. OK, I think we have to stop this here. Thank you again, Christian, for your inspiring talk. Thank you all for your questions. And if you would like to deepen the conversation or discussion with Christian, I think he will be around after this panel. Thank you. Please clap your hands. We will now move on to the scientific panel discussion. And with me today are three experts. And I'm very happy to introduce you. Feel free to come to the stage while I introduce you to the audience. First of all, we have Laura Nissen. She's a doctoral researcher in the Netherlands. And her research focuses on circular business models and how companies can promote sufficiency and sustainable consumption. Before joining academia, Laura worked on the circular economy in Ireland. We have Dr. Iana Nesterova. She's a fellow in northern Sweden and a practitioner of voluntary simplicity. Prior to her postdoctoral fellowship, Iana completed her PhD on small business transition towards de-gross in Great Britain. She theorizes de-gross businesses, researches, business transformations towards a de-gross society, and teaches social geography. And last but not least, we have Professor Henning Breuer. He's a consultant, a researcher, and also a lecturer in Berlin in the fields of innovation management and business psychology. He's the founder of a consultancy UX Berlin and a professor for business and media psychology. A warm welcome to all of you. And since I don't have a chair, obviously, I have to stay here. And so, yeah, I'm sorry for this. I would like to kick off our discussion following up on the interesting talk and discussion we just had with Christian. I think Equager is a great example for a sustainable and value-based business model. Henning, can you give us a short intro to value-based innovation and sustainable business models and their design? And maybe, thank you, refer, if possible, to Equager. Yeah, thank you for that question. Where to start? So values-based innovation management, that's like an approach we introduced a couple of years ago, where we said that kind of complementary to the usually kind of opportunity and opportunistic search for new market gaps, new market potentials, and so forth, we need a more values-based approach to uncovering new business domains. And what we then developed in that tradition is, first of all, attend to human values in the context of business, right? And their role, they play in taking strategic decisions. So for instance, in the case of Ecosia, a colleague of mine just had a very nice paper published on that, a very comprehensive case study. We looked into the six core values that Ecosia has, values like sustainability, but also impact and integrity, and looked into how they play out in establishing and developing the Ecosia business model. And then we see, well, this is not an easy task always. It's not always predefined. For instance, I remember there was a request from, I think, an energy, fossil fuel energy company to collaborate with a green search engine. And so there was a debate in how far might this company use Ecosia just for greenwashing its own business activities. On the other hand, following the value of impact, they could say, well, if all the employees of that company and all their customers suddenly use Ecosia, we can plant a whole lot more trees. In the end, the decision was taken against the impact and for the integrity in that case. So I mean, even when you have these values in place, it's still an ongoing effort to elaborate on that. And first thing we acknowledge is that every individual, every company, every organization has some kind of values in place. That might be a priority for shareholder value, but even if that is the priority, there are also other values in place. And all companies have mission, vision, purpose statements, and so forth that also give a direction in their marketing, in their hiring, but unfortunately, not always in the way they drive innovation. And so this is what we're looking into here in when we talk about values in the context of innovation. And that goes a little bit against the more narrow view where we talk about the economic concept about value creation that is even then spreading to the sustainability domain where we talk about social value creation or environmental value creation still with a kind of economic mindset in the background. And what we're saying is that the traditional model is you create a certain value for your customers. They can find interesting search results. You create a value for the organization because they make revenues and you create some value to society because you pay taxes and pay salaries, so create employment opportunities. But if we wanna be serious about sustainable business models, we have to go beyond that and look into a broader range of different values and a broader range of stakeholders in that context. Yeah. Great intro to the topic of our panel. I would like to ask you, Yana, what is the focus of your research and what is the connection to the sustainable business model topic that we are discussing today? Yeah, thank you so much for this question. I think it's really beautiful in a way. And so my research since 2016 has focused on de-growth business. And by that, I mean a business that needs to undergo transformations from Chris Carrera's perspective in four domains of social reality and that will be human in and being, the relationships between humans, social structures and material transactions with nature. And so if we want kind of de-growth business to come to reality, then transformations in these kind of four planes of social being need to unfold. And in the very beginning, when I started working with a de-growth business as a concept, I feel like I theorized it too much as like a social entity. When now in more recent works, I see de-growth business more as a process of navigating capitalist landscapes. And quite often people ask me, is this de-growth business, the Patagonia de-growth is a cozy de-growth business. And I think it's very, it feels quite uncomfortable if I would label a business as either or as a de-growth business or not because I feel like it's much more productive and interesting to kind of have this kind of discussion in which domains is it a de-growth business and in which it's not. So personally I don't believe that businesses cannot be part of de-growth. So I feel like I have much gentle approach to that. So I'm very impressed actually at what companies are doing. And even though they are embedded within a capital system and personally I would not want the system to exist but at the same time they do also their best. And I think we can of course criticize companies based on some things that they do, but I prefer to see them kind of in this positive way of journey, transformation and becoming. Yeah. Thanks Laura, can you take us on your journey researching circular economy businesses and their contribution to sustainability? Yeah, so I have been working on circular economy for a while and I was in one of the sessions yesterday where somebody said, oh, circular economy is the new greenwashing of the industry. And I think there's definitely that danger that circular economy might, while it has really useful ways to contribute to sustainability, also be taken over by policy, taken over by big business because we do not really know the actual impact of circular strategies. And we know that the likes of recycling which pretty much everybody does is not enough. So we really are trying with the circular business model research to push people towards what we call the better versions, the higher letters of the waste hierarchy which is really reducing in the first place that resources are used, reusing items, repairing, potentially rental and that's maybe where my own research comes in a bit more. So I look into sufficiency in circular business models which means how can companies help their customers consume less? Which might be a bit unusual as a starting point, but we know that companies create demand, they put out advertisements, they create products and they make people want to buy things which reuse resources. So on the other hand, we also see that they do have the responsibility to rethink if I offer this reuse option, if I have this rental service for clothing, does it actually make people consume more? Because that does happen. We see the likes of the vintage clothing getting very popular. Vintage might be an example, that's very big and people still consume and they still consume fast fashion. It might be secondhand, but they still keep buying new things because they still want to have the newest things and cool items. So there's really interesting business models that specifically look into sufficiency and that consider consumption as well. And just two examples that I personally like. One is homey, they're a washing machine rental and you pay per wash, but if you wash at a lower temperature, so if you wash at 30 degrees, it's actually cheaper than if you wash at 60 degrees because that way you're enticed to wash at a lower temperature, which is more energy saving. Or a cooperative example, and I think they were in one of the sessions yesterday as well, is Camon, which are a electronics rental cooperative and they have the policy that if you use your fare phone or your shift phone that they rent for a longer time, after a few years it gets cheaper, your monthly rate. So because you promote the longevity of products and you don't just exchange your product, you actually reduce consumption and you by that have a cheaper rate. That's very exciting and interesting and I would like to come back to the sufficiency business models later, but first of all stick to the circular economy. And my question would be if you think that digitalization has an impact on these business models and in which way? Yeah, I think very much so. And on the one hand it's really practical because for a lot of the circular economy things for the likes of re-manufacturing, refurbishing in construction for instance, we do a lot of or we want a lot of reuse of buildings or reuse of building materials, but we also need to know what was in those buildings. So one of the things that digitalization can really help with our product passports or material passports where we can link what was in a product beforehand and we can trace it back so that if we reuse it, we recycle it or what not, we know if there were toxic materials in it. You obviously cannot recycle a plastic into a food grade plastic if we know that there was some kind of toxic material in it, you can't use it for packaging then. So that's a really obvious side for the production or industrial symbiosis, which is also very much supported by digitalization. But also I think for the consumption side, we see that a lot of the repair, DIY repairs well to a certain extent or reuse is really supported by digitalization, by connecting, by offering repair guides online, by being able to get the blueprints for spare parts if something breaks in your items. So there is a lot of potential for digitalization to help circuit economy, but obviously always taken with a pinch of salt because we know that it can also lead to people consuming more. So just being aware of that. Yeah, coming to the risks. Jana, I read in one of your publications that you propose small and especially lower tech firms or entities as agents of sustainable change. Based on this work, do you see digitalization more as an enabler for sustainability transformation or more than a risk? Well, yes, I did write that work. But I think that I feel still good about that because I felt like it was fair to problematize the role of technology and the role of digitalization, for example. So I think we should ask such questions whether digitalization and technology generally or higher technology is always the solution. And I personally believe that it really depends. But it's not really that binary that for example, that we need an extremely low tech technology because there are such proposals of going back, for example, to being hand-togethers or going back to 12th century technology. And they come across as more kind of fiction writing to be honest, even though they are philosophical and discourse. But so for me, I think it's very important to ask ourselves what value does that technology create? Which processes can be done with technology which ones can be done without a high technology whether it's always necessary and how that kind of process kind of interacts with society. And so I feel like some things require high technology and digitalization. I think it can be extremely helpful and wonderful. And I think some processes can be done with low technology and gone picking blueberries in the north of Sweden, for example. I think this is such a nature connected activity. So I think it really very much depends and we need to look at case by case basis and not assume that technology is the solution or the only solution. Yeah, that's how I see it. So is anyone of you aware of a good example of a company who is exactly doing this, like kind of evaluating the question, do we need more technology to achieve our goals, to achieve more sustainability? Equager, of course. If not, there's time to think about and we'll come to Henning again. And you've been thinking a lot about patterns, about principles, criteria for sustainable business models. What challenges do you see for economic actors in the sustainability transformation and for mainstreaming and scaling sustainable business models? I know it's a broad question. Yeah, again, where to start. So I think the first thing to recognize and we talked about this initially before is that even though this might be an unusual panel here for this conference, I think business has a very important role to play in this transformation because there's numbers from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, for instance, that estimate a number between five and seven trillion U.S. dollars needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. There are business opportunities about twice that size, right? About also numbers from the United Nations, about 12 trillion, so that's I think 16 zeros or so, to succeed in that transformation. So I think we need business and we need companies and we also need the big and established companies to participate in that. I mean, it's great if startups and young companies really engage and fight for a purpose, but I think the impact would be much higher if the big players, so to say, join in on that. And in order to facilitate or support this transition, one of our recent research that we conducted, so myself together with Professor Dr. Florian Lüdecke-Freund and Lorenzo Massa was to have a look and to the literature on sustainable business models to ask what sustainable business models are already out there. And so we scanned really the whole literature and every article that claims, ah, we have a sustainable business model, so to say, and try to sort out those and try to identify the recurring design principles for those sustainable business models. Sometimes that involves a decision is that a sustainable business model in the first place or is it not? And this is what we described as patterns, right? So patterns in that sense are, I mean, many people may know that from software engineering, right? So design patterns for software here, we applied that to business models and try to understand what are recurring challenges in a certain domain. For instance, we need to provide a certain service for a neglected group of users and we need to increase accessibility. We need to promote green mobility, for instance, right? So we have these recurring challenges and then we have recurring solutions addressing these challenges. And these are what we described as such business model patterns. Yeah, right. And we identified 45 of those patterns that actually do what a sustainable business model should do, not just maximize the economic value creation, so to say, or maximizing the shareholder value, but also creating social and environmental benefits. Yeah. One example on that, or? Yeah, I had one. So, I mean, and what the interesting thing is when that becomes really powerful is when the different elements of change positively influence one another, right? So one well-known example is an Indian eye care facility named Aravind. So they provide cataract treatments, which are so gray star operations, which are very widespread phenomenon in India and in many other countries. The problem in India is that many people, especially living out in the rural areas, they don't know about it. The elder in the family turn blind and the whole family can fall into poverty. Even if they know what's going on, they may not have the financial means to go to the next big city, get an expensive hospital operation and so forth. So they started with a mission to eliminate needless blindness and started working on these problems, right? So they started to send screening trucks onto the rural areas, into the villages to identify the people who have such a problem progressing, who need such an operation. They improved, they did new partnerships with local business to bring down the costs of operation for these lenses from formerly around $200 a piece to less than $5 a piece. So they could radically reduce their cost base, right? They took McDonald's and the way they produced the burgers as an example to make their operations more efficient, right? So it's not that you make an appointment two days later, come to the hospital and are welcome, brought to your room and all that kind of stuff but they really do it in a kind of walkthrough mode, right? And they invented a new business model which is a social freemium business model, meaning that if you go there and need an operation, you don't need to justify anything. You can just say, do you want a paid operation or do you want a free operation? So if you get a paid operation, then you get an extra room and maybe some flowers by the side of your desk and have some more time to wake up and relax. If you do not want to pay, you just got the operations, the same quality. And yeah, by this is there, we're wanting to achieve much more than a traditional value proposition, as we would call that in business terms, right? Which would be, yeah, we deliver high quality eye care operations, no, no, no. But only if you see the underlying mission to eliminate needless blindness in India, so you understand how this whole business model and how this whole ecosystem of innovations emerges. And then additional effects emerge from that, for instance, the doctors. For the doctors, it's very attractive to work at these hospitals, because surgeons, the currency of the surgeons' experience and professional quality, so to say, is often the number of operations they have. And due to this new process model, they have a very high number of operations. So actually for the surgeons, it's very attractive to work there. They can acquire very high quality staff through that, right? And still they can maintain their business and run these operations. So that's, I think, it's showing very nicely how a new business model now optimizing towards the social domain can also sustain itself economically. And if I got it right, you not only looked at business models in the Northern, or in the global North, but also in the global South, which I found is very interesting and great work. Yeah, I mean, what Christian here just presented, right? This profit reinvestment is one of the business model we are describing, and that's been used in the environmental domain. But originally it has been used a lot also in the social domain, right? Like in Bangladesh, where Grameen Danonev started selling yogurts, high nutrition yogurts to the population to a very, very low price. And after a certain amount of time, Seth started saying, well, we do not pay any dividends anymore to our investors, but we reinvest our profits into making these yogurts even more accessible, even more cheaper for the population, really, to optimize on the social good they're creating. And trying to connect or to find the link again to the question of digitalization. Did you also analyze the degree of using technology or digital tools for achieving or for scaling sustainable business models? Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, a lot of these sustainable business models or sustainability-oriented business models would be the more proper way to call them because it's difficult to say when a business model is fully sustainable. Oh my God, I'm sorry. Sustainable. So yeah, I mean, a lot of these business models and circular economy business models are a good example. They really require digitalization and sensor technology and, I don't know, like distributed computing and so forth. On the other hand, and I think that's an interesting part as well, the development of new technologies, I think also should be much more aware of these underlying values and the sustainability orientation in them. For instance, with my company, we're participating in a European project that's developing the 5G telecommunication ecosystem, right? And this you can also develop in very, very distinct ways. Rather, if you optimize for, I don't know, more traditional measures or if you optimize it for highest sustainability performance, a good environmental performance and so forth, right? How you enable mobility, for instance, the social freemium model can easily be transferred into a green freemium model, for instance, right? Where you say, okay, because you have the sensor data, for instance, or the data from different modalities, how you move through a city, you can say, I have just in time information about the greenest route, in addition to the shortest route, and then I can make the greenest route available for free or at very low costs, whereas you charge a premium for people who really need, I don't know, to take the airplane to go to Barcelona, for instance, right? Yeah. Thanks. Laura, I promise that we will come back to the sufficiency-oriented business model, so your research focus, and I think you already touched the point of the growth paradigm, and I would like to further elaborate on this, and my question would be if you think that, or how do these business models fit into our growth-oriented economic system and what your research tells you about this question? Yeah, I think it was also briefly mentioned like Christian, when he was talking about the profit maximization in American firms versus German ones. There are plenty of companies that talk about sufficiency and that promote sufficiency to their customers in the current economic system, so I've tried to create a database, I've found over 150 across all different sectors that are openly saying, you need to consume less, you need to consume at sustainable levels, you need to rethink whether you actually have to buy things, but also when you do talk to them, they either try to get profit through services, or they face the inherent conundrum that they are trying to sell things while at the same time trying not to sell things, and that's very much about the need to have profit, but at the same time you could stop if you cover costs, right? But these companies oftentimes, even if they are aware of sufficiency and even if they do want to promote sufficiency, want to grow for the sole reason that they want to displace companies that are using conventional methods. So if you talk to sufficiency companies and they say we know we shouldn't really be growing, this isn't really what we want to do, but we want to do it nevertheless or we will do it nevertheless because then in the flowery words of one of the interviews I had, all the shit companies are gone, so I understand why they do it, but it's problematic. And I think Jana might maybe have a point to say to that as well, but I think it's clear that sufficiency companies might have an easier time in a non-growth focused, maybe de-growth focused economy, which we're not at yet. Maybe we will be there, so they are existing, but yeah, I think there might be a different economic system that might be easier for them. Jana, do you want to add on this before we open to your questions in the audience? I completely agree. I think that it would definitely be easier for such companies to exist and navigate the kind of their being in the world if it was some kind of a post-growth or de-growth economy. At the same time, I feel like we're not there and I'm not sure quite a lot of people would say share pessimism in terms of whether de-growth economy is going to come about at least very kind of soon. But what I see in my research is how these companies that have sufficiency at the heart of their operations, I feel that they have some kind of, of course, their restrictions as to difficulties, how they operate and navigate these landscapes, but I noticed that they have also coping strategies and they got often, maybe you noticed the same, they often unite with companies that share their values and worldviews and perspectives and their tracks, kind of communities and even sometimes politicians and researchers like ourselves. And so I feel like there is some kind of hope in that. So I think that they do find ways still to exist somehow, right, yeah. That's a nice word for closing the first round of questions or if... I would have one question back here. I mean, a little provocative, I mean, hopefully not too provocative, but so if you think about de-growth business and the de-growth kind of economy, I mean, the question is doesn't that assume this, what I stated initially, this very narrowly, economically focused thinking in the first place, right? I mean, isn't, so if you take a step back and say, well, maybe this is not such a one-dimensional road, but it's a very multi-dimensional game, right? Where we have different values at play, right? Like in the example of Ecosia when they say, oh, okay, so we want to strive for impact. But in that case, actually we have to prioritize our integrity in order to maybe achieve more impact in the long term or so forth, right? So, and when it becomes not such a mono-dimensional thing but more with matter of what do we care about, yeah? What's important for us as human beings, as employees, as organizations and so forth, and then we take a deliberate decision for that, what's wrong with growing in that dimension, so to say, right? Why, I don't know, I wouldn't mind Ecosia taking a much huge market space, so to say, then, in comparison to the other companies, so to say. Can I respond? Sure. Actually, I think that a lot of people would expect that people's ground to de-growth would say no, of course not, you're so wrong. But actually, I think that there are so many ways to see de-growth and unfortunately the world is extremely horrible and it's very ugly. And the world de-growth itself, it carries a lot of negativity and I don't blame people for interpreting de-growth as in we don't want companies to grow or we don't want something else to grow. And to be honest, the way myself and my close colleagues theorize de-growth is not like this whatsoever because we acknowledge that there is ecological and social degradation, but at the same time, in the paper that will come out hopefully soon, we theorize de-growth as something that entails both less and more. I am, as a theorist of de-growth business, I'm absolutely welcoming towards growth of business actually and especially in number of businesses that are very good for society and also in the size of businesses. So for me, I very much agree with you and I do not translate this macroeconomic vision of shrinkage to the micro level of business. So I think it really needs to be highlighted and actually thank you so much for bringing up that point because I think it's so important that people see this way that there's so much growth in de-growth and in so many different, in beautiful business models, in different modes of relation with the world and with each other and growth in beautiful policies that facilitate this kind of mode of being. So I so completely agree. So we need more Equalias out there and with this, I would like to open the discussion to questions from the audience. So are there any questions? And do we have a microphone to hand around? We had a second mic, where can I find it? You only have one? Okay. It's going to be an exercise for me now to come up there or maybe you, thanks Lena. Thanks. Thanks a lot for this discussion that went on a number of points like optimizing business models and de-growth and circular economy. I would like to return maybe back to the point that Christian made about the profitability of companies and to what extent that is necessary and especially saying, because Christian was saying that there's mainly American companies and you were stressing this as well, American companies going on the shareholder value in terms of they must make money. It's actually the same in Germany. There's the Argygesetz, there's the GMB Hargesetz that actually commits companies to make money. And it was a very simple question. Why don't we or civil society or politicians then in the end not just abolish this law, not the entire GMB Hargesetz, but this very point that a company needs to make a profit because then that would certainly enable the way of impacting a company being a member of society in a much more valuable way as the purpose companies do. Okay, thank you. Who wants to answer on this? Thanks very much. Maybe just for an initial answer and then there might be other opinions on this. I very much agree there's research. You have three researchers here. There's research on the fact that we need to change the governance structures in companies if we want to move towards sustainable business models. So if we have for-profit businesses, in how far can they consider environmental and social values when they operate? And there's really interesting work done in Sweden by Jennifer Hinton, if you ever want to look it up, who looks into big operations, into cooperatives, worker cooperatives, customer cooperatives and tries to show whether that would be better governance structures in order for business to move towards less need for profit and more for environmental and social value creation as well. I don't know if Henning or Jana have any thoughts? Yeah, actually I'm not an expert on these GMBH laws, but as far as I know, I mean there's nothing forcing corporations to pursue this one very monodimensional maximization of shareholder value strategy. Even in the United States, I'm not so sure about that. There's a, actually there was an initiative in 2019 from the business round table. It's a collaboration of 200 leading US American firms that gather once a year, right? And all the big players, all the big companies like General Motors, Apple, I mean they're all part of this club so to say and for the first time and they had the statement on the purpose of the corporation. And all the years from the 1990s when they started first publishing that annual round table report until 2018, 2019, they always had this credo to say, we are dedicated to increase our shareholders value and I don't know, to other good things if necessary, so to say, right? And in 2018, the first time they declared no actually companies have an obligation and a responsibility to all stakeholders in society. And they explicitly mentioned the employees and the customers and other countries and future generations. So I think there's a change in the mind shifts already going on and I mean if that needs additional legal support then of course we're highly supportive of that but actually as we saw in the case of Ecosia or Patagonia or other companies, I mean you're not obliqued to a single strategy so to say, right? I think that's pretty much under the decision and a matter of the values of the ones running that organization or that company. Thanks for your answers. Are there more questions up there? You know, can you go? I think just a bit. So now it's you exercising. Hi, I'm Laura and I'm also doing research on sufficiency business. And I have a question to Jana. At the beginning you said you understand businesses as a process and I find that very interesting. It's also some definition I have of business in my research. Could you elaborate a little bit on this? How, what kind of process? How you understand that? And maybe have you published something about this view? Actually my reflection on your question is that you know when I theorized my integral businesses like as an entity or identify some kind of practices and principles that it needs to have and then I went into the field and then that's when I realized actually that it's just not the way it is because I can theorize all I want but then businesses are very much real life entities and so for me I started seeing from the field how it is a journey and the process not necessarily pretty fine in any way and it just, I think that it is shaped from kind of being to becoming and in the interrelation between the business and its surrounding environment and that environment and that's where I think geography really plays such a big role because that environment is this kind of constellation of structures of natural and social structures and so this kind of, I think that if I have to think about the process and like elaborate on that in a way I think that we should as researchers be playful with that and like learn from those companies how they navigate it, what they do because I think sometimes they know even more about the processality and kind of the nature of that so yeah, but actually let's talk later because I also want to know like what you're finding in your research because I feel like, I don't know just provoke my thinking what you said about like that you're also in the same field as us, right? We can talk later. Yes, please. Okay, I saw more hands up in the air there's one. Hi, thank you for the very interesting discussion. I'm Carmen and I'm doing research on the role of organizational culture in sustainable and digital development in small and medium sized enterprises and what I'm wondering is for example the EU and then you recovery plan, they have especially said that small and medium sized enterprises are a key change agent for achieving a more digital sustainable and resilient economy and society and we have all these frameworks now we have these concepts which is very good but I'm just wondering how do we speed this up? Like what do we need because if we take this time to do the cultural shift within the companies which then takes time to settle down there then takes time to get into society to make people consume less. What is it that we need now? Is it like yeah, more loss? Is it incentives? Is it penalties for businesses? I'm just wondering like how does this all come together because actually time is running out for this paradigm shift to take place so yeah, that's just a struggling, I'm struggling with that. I just, can I, my fellow panelists agree that I can just continue talking a little bit? I also do research on SMEs actually and seeing them as agents for transformation and I feel like to speed up this whole process I think it really, it again depends on the context but I feel like there's not, from Chris Corrie's perspective for example there's not one single mechanism that facilitates it and I think we need to look at, that's why earlier I mentioned this four planes of being and that transformations really need to come from each one of them. For example, I noticed when I researched small businesses is that a lot of those business persons they are so aware of the problems and you know, I could learn from them quite a lot so and we need to empower them, we need to make it possible for them to organize in communities and create spaces. Then education, earlier we heard that business schools are extremely narrow-minded quite often I was in a business school for a long time and so we need to change education. We need also, earlier you mentioned Jen Hinton and she works with Professor Max Koch and he introduced something like a virtuous policy cycle and he kind of outlines how all the policies interlay so we need to introduce, for example maybe we need to simplify some of the policy we need to introduce regulations that make a better business possible we need to introduce maybe maximum income so people are not as obsessed with some kind of this standard definition of success so I feel like there's not like one single thing, right? I feel like there is so much that we need to facilitate it, do you want to add some? Yeah, I mean I fully agree there's not probably the one path I mean different approaches I mean the one that we were trying to work on was with the sustainable business model patterns, right? To provide those two startups also and to young companies in order to pursue a more sustainable business model from the start and I think for what worked well in the last 10 years or so for the big companies in Europe was the sustainability reporting that became obligatory, right? For big companies and I think that would be also a good idea to make that obligatory also for smaller companies and for startups maybe in a smaller scale but at least to be pointed to these issues and to force them to or not like Christian said to deal with these issues in the first place, right? And not after, I don't know, they've been profitable for 10 years then think, okay, now maybe we can do something good for the world as well now that we're big in business, so to say, right? But yeah, I'm sure there are different approaches. I entirely agree with what has been said but just maybe to give a bit of a hopeful perspective I know what you're saying, the time is running out we've heard our houses on fire, so what do we do? And I think I personally very much believe in people power so on the one hand, there is this kind of research into social movements that guesses that around 3% of society need to actually take up a cause actively and that can turn an entire society. This is mainly based on revolutions and I'm not saying we need a revolution necessarily but it's a hopeful number and you wouldn't believe the amount of CEOs of big companies that have started thinking about sustainability because of their children coming home saying, mom, dad, what are you doing in your company for us? So it is really about education but we also have a really, really smart young generation already going to the streets every Friday so we know that there's definitely a lot of people aware of this, really worried about this and I think in addition to policies and business action that's a big thing that we need to consider as well. Okay, we still have time for another question and there's one in the front. Hi, I have a question actually to you Henning because you mentioned this 45 patterns or design principles so I just would like to understand the nature of it. Can you name one example and show how you measure it and do they all coexist or do they depend on an industry or just elaborate a bit on it? Yeah, actually I mean they're based on the literature as I said, right, so on what has been published in that domain and then we kind of clustered them into these 45 patterns and they are quite individual so to say, we have 11 groups one are more dealing with financing, one are dealing more with some are more with equal efficiencies, others are I don't know with more with accessibility bottom of the pyramid issues and so forth and yeah, so they're pretty individual so to say, right and these are the ones that have been reported in the literature and that have some evidence speaking for them and in some cases actually that was not and examples are what I already mentioned, right? The social freemium in the case of Aravind that's one of the patterns social freemium, profit reinvestment what Christian showed us result oriented services, right? So where you do not pay for light bulbs for instance but for the infrastructure and have some environmental benefits based on that. So these are some examples of these 45 patterns. Another one is buy one give one for instance, right? For every pair of shoes you buy, you donate a second pair of shoes to people in need in a third world country and that's always, I mean, difficult to decide then is that really a sustainable business model pattern or does it not have more of these rebound effects or unintended consequences that always come along with these innovations, right? And so there has been and we really went into these studies, right? And they have been empirical studies for instance in El Salvador looking into what is happening with these shoes that are being donated. Are they harming the local shoe business for instance? Are they eradicating employment possibilities for the people in that? Are they at all addressing the underlying causes of poverty, right? If you just hand out a pair of shoes, right? And so there has been modest, not significant empirical evidence for doing that and actually the company, Tom's Shoes, who initiated that, then went on to addressing more of the underlying causes of poverty, right? Providing clean water, providing improved healthcare and so forth, right? So for every pair you buy, you don't get another pair of shoes but you invest in some development projects of that kind, right? So I mean, all these models are also under evolution but all the ones, the 45 we have in that book, we have at least good reason to believe that they do have a positive impact and I mean, if you look into them, they also range from very abstract principles, so to say, eco-efficiency and productivity down to very specific financing models like differentiated pricing or the social freemium that I mentioned, eco-efficient designs and so forth, right? So there's a whole range but in the end, I mean, you have to decide it for every pattern and for every business environment actually, even Ecosia has been under criticism, right? Christian said now they're not only looking at the number of trees they're counting but do they survive? Next question would be, how long do they survive? How big do they get in the first place, right? How, what kind of difference do they make in that social ecosystem? How are they really supporting the local communities or maybe having also some unintended effects, right? That actually need to be managed. So if you implement one of these patterns and one of these sustainable business models, the journey is just beginning, right? And that's why I think this foundational value space is so important because only if you have that pretty straight then you have, yeah, also the resilience yourself and the consequence, so to say, and really making that impact as positive as it can get. Okay, I think it's great that we emphasize the journey and the process and that businesses are, are also made of people who are, yeah, who are doing their best in some cases to get on the journey for more sustainability. And I will close this panel with the last question and this is, yeah, maybe kind of an utopian mind game and I know it's not easy to pick one, the one thing, but this would be my question. If you have a wish for one thing, one measure, one tool can be political or it can be social change, which would support business models to become the norm. What would you wish for? And Henning, since you are already holding the microphone, maybe you start. Yeah, tough one, but I mean, I don't know, we talked about taxes here and there, maybe a tax relief for sustainable business models to make them also financially more easily viable than they currently are. I'm actually following up on Henning but maybe going a bit further. So there is quite a bit of discussion on changing taxation from labor to resources. So instead of taxing your working hours, which currently finances our social system, the idea is that we tax whenever resources are being used. That means that on the one hand, resources become more expensive, which means that people might use fewer resources, but on the other hand, the handy side effect is labor becomes more affordable and a lot of things like repair, remanufacturing, refurbishment require a lot of manpower. So while you might want your washing machine repaired at the moment, it could be cheaper to get a new one, that might change then because the work in those services might be cheaper while the resources are more expensive. So it's one way and it's maybe a bit utopian, but I think it's not a bad way to look at it. For me, it would be, it's not policy. It's something, it's super utopian. I would want a complete redefinition of success, what we mean by success in society. I feel that quite often this kind of more mainstream agenda is being pushed as in, you know, in business schools, for example, that success, you can reduce it to profit or possessions or something, and that very much relates to what I observe in businesses that I research. And I ask them why, the business persons why they do what they do differently, you know, why they forego some of the profits and why they step on their journey in the first place. And they just have a different worldview. They pursue success in very different terms. And I hope that, and I can, as a practitioner of voluntary simplest, I can very much relate to that as well. So I wish there are some kind of, I don't know, either some kind of self-refection or some structures, or maybe both, some structures in place that facilitate this different mode of being in the world, different mode of relatedness with yourself, others, and nature, yeah. I think that's great closing words. And with this, I thank you for your good questions, your interesting questions for your interest in this panel. I also, of course, thank you for your inspiring ideas and discussion. I thank Christian for your talk in the beginning. And yeah, maybe a little applause.