02.02.2012

On February 1, Prof. Dr. Christian Berg of SAP held a captivating lecture on "Sustainability as Driver for Innovation" at the NIT. 

Prof. Berg put special emphasis on the importance of innovations: inventions that are successful in the market. Companies should focus on the question “What will be successful tomorrow?”  and “Which possible trends, risks and opportunities can be defined?”. 

In the field of sustainability, Prof. Berg defined scarcities as a strong driver for innovation and pointed out a trend towards priced common goods, such as carbon certificates. According to Prof. Berg and others, climate change and other megatrends will be the legal battlefield of tomorrow. 

In the end, Prof. Berg introduced SAPs Enterprise Resource Planning System which was developed to optimize the use companies make mainly of their financial resources. Since 2004, Prof. Berg “preached” (as he said) within SAP that other resources should also be taken into account, last but not least natural resources – with the effect that SAP has become a role model for sustainable business in its branch. SAP is the world leader in many sustainability indices and rankings, and is now engaging in leveraging its expertise to find innovative solutions for making things run (ecologically) better. 

After the lecture students took the chance to discuss further questions on sustainability and possible problems of the future directly with the professor.