Master the Future: AI and Sustainability from a Strategic Perspective

Prof. Dr. Dominik K. Kanbach

Prof. Dr. Dominik K. Kanbach is a full Professor and holder of the Chair of Strategic Entrepreneurship at HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management in Germany. He leads the Strategic Entrepreneurship Research Group at HHL and serves as Academic Director of DIGITAL SPACE – The HHL Digital Transformation Platform focused on incubating digital business models. His research interest covers the fields of strategic management, entrepreneurship, and innovation management. He has published over 100 articles in leading international peer-reviewed journals and holds several editor positions. He teaches courses on strategic management, entrepreneurship and innovation management in top universities and business schools around the world. Before joining academia, he worked as a strategy consultant for several years. He has received numerous research and teaching awards and the leading German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche ranked him among the top 2% of scholars in the German-speaking countries in December 2024.

Prof. Dr. Armin Heinzl

Armin Heinzl is Professor and Chair in General Management and Information Systems at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His research and teaching interests focus on digital innovation, digital platform ecosystems, avatars, computational creativity, as well as healthcare IT.

He received his Master's degree from the University of Frankfurt and his dissertation and habilitation from the Koblenz School of Corporate Management (WHU Koblenz – Otto-Beisheim-Hochschule). Heinzl has held visiting positions at Harvard, Berkeley, Irvine, ESSEC Paris, London School of Economics, and USI Lugano. He was a founding co-director of Mannheim Business School. He is currently Chairman of the Supervisory Board of America AG and a member of the Executive Board of baden-württemberg connected e.V. (bwcon).

Previously, he was a member of the supervisory and advisory boards of Heliad KGaA, UBS Deutschland AG and Treasury Intelligence Systems (TIS) GmbH. His research has been published in leading international journals such as Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, Journal of MIS, Journal of the AIS, Journal of IT, IS Journal, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Engineering Management, Business Information Systems Engineering, Evolutionary Computation, and others.

Dr. Manuel Reppmann

Dr. Manuel Reppmann is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Professorship for Sustainable Business at the University of Hamburg, where he explores topics related to the sustainability transformation of companies. He completed his PhD at the University of Mannheim in 2022. His research focuses on stakeholder engagement, sustainability-related communication, and non-financial reporting. Many of his current and past research projects are characterized by close collaborations with large companies and international research teams. He has conducted research stays at the Saïd Business School (University of Oxford) and HEC Montréal. His work has been published in globally leading journals, including the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, both of which are ranked among the top 50 in the Financial Times Research Rankings. In 2022, he received the German Science Award in the category of "Best Research Project."

As the scientific director of the "Sustainability Transformation Monitor" study, Manuel Reppmann leads Germany's largest long-term study on sustainability in companies within the real economy and financial sector. He has also been sharing his expertise since 2018 as a consultant in sustainability strategy and reporting, as well as a trainer for customized company programs and MBA lecturer.