For you as a manager: What does it mean to strive for sustainability?

Responsibility and sustainability are firmly anchored in my area of accountability as a board member. It is therefore very important to me that we take a pioneering role in the fight against climate change. It is one of my personal core beliefs that businesses can and should set the pace. Working in the digital industry, I continuously remind everybody that our digital life has an impact on the environment and society. However, I do everything in my power to unleash the positive effects of digitalization on the environment. Digital economy plays a key role on the way to a more sustainable world. It is up to us to ensure that positive effects are widely used and that negative effects are limited. I am convinced that we as a telecommunications provider can make a significant contribution to the digitization of Germany and thus to a more sustainable way of living and working.

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What makes open source the basis for innovation and sustainability in IT?

Open source stands first and foremost for principles that stimulate innovation and promote collaboration, transparency and inclusion. The end result is a sustainable innovation engine fueled by the passion of innovators. Only through transparency and inclusion can an active community flourish and benefit society. Transparency means open access to information, open communication between all participants and comprehensible decision-making processes that serve as guiding standards. All this is necessary to ensure that as many people as possible contribute, speak up and voice their opinions and that the innovation continuously builds. Inclusion ensures that diverse ideas and points of view are included and all voices are heard, because a diverse community will always generate more innovation and a heterogeneous community will always achieve better results than groups consisting of lone fighters.

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Sustainability is often seen as a moral obligation, but not as a dimension of success. How can we reframe sustainability as crucial to business success?
 If we look at what is happening globally, then we see that climate change is actually an urgent planetary problem. Just in the past ten years, we have seen record-breaking fires, famines and storms. And this has to be addressed by businesses too. We at SAP are calling it the ‚Green Line‘, where it needs to become a core part of business not only to gain profitability (top line) and operational efficiency (down line) or business model innovations but also to take climate action. That should become the sustainable norm for companies. The shareholders will expect it, the consumers will expect it, the customers will expect it. It won’t happen just because it is ordered top-down or because there is a compelling event like regulations passed in the EU or America or Asia, it has to come from within an organization to live a sustainable enterprise philosophy.

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You are an advocate of the so-called circular economy. What is the difference between the traditional and the circular economy?
The traditional economic system in which we currently exist is linear, meaning we extract resources, use them, and then throw them away (or at best recycle). The circular economy reinvents this unsustainable ‘take, make, waste’ model by closing the loop and keeping resources in productive use in a ‘take, make, take, make’ system, while addressing some of our most pressing environmental challenges, as well as presenting significant financial value to organizations – $4.5 trillion by 2030.

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