Actively shaping the future

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Dr. Andrej Heinke on the podium at the Haus der Wirtschaft (Stuttgart, Germany) | Download

Disruptive innovations are essential for the future viability of companies of all sizes. Incremental innovations deliver value, but do not prepare companies for the digital future. For this reason, Prof. Dr. Werner G. Faix, Managing Director of the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship (SIBE) of Steinbeis University and Dean of the Faculty of Leadership & Management at Steinbeis University, used his opening speech at the scientific symposium "Leadership in a Digital World" to draw attention to the urgency of disruptive innovations in companies.

One of the groundbreaking disruptive innovations of the past ten years has been artificial intelligence (AI), which is already being used in many areas of human life and work. In the future, countless other fields of application for AI technologies are predicted. A less considered topic in public discussion is the connection between ethics and artificial intelligence. The fact that people program AI applications means that they follow morals and ethics of the programmers. Prof. Dr. Klaus Mainzer, Emeritus of Excellence at the Technical University of Munich, has been working on the highly relevant question of how to deal with this challenge for several years. At the international symposium in Stuttgart, he gave a video lecture in which he presented the relevance of a concrete road map for cooperation between man and machine.

In the digital future everyone will be confronted with this kind of cooperation. This applies to specialists as well as to managers and leaders. The recruitment and training of these executives will also take place in the context of artificial intelligence. For this reason, Dr. Sylke Piéch, Senior Research Manager Educational Technology Lab of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, held a workshop on "Qualification of Leaders in the Context of AI" as part of the symposium. Dr. Piéch described, among other things, how recruitment with the help of artificial intelligence, so-called robot recruiting, can look like. The workshop leader emphasized that although the selection process is controlled by the AI, the human being should always make the final decisions.

In order for AI processes such as robot recruiting to be integrated into companies, fundamental institutional changes are required, e.g. in the mindset of employees. Implementing these changes can be facilitated by an innovation-oriented corporate culture. At this point, managers have a duty to drive forward developments and take employees along on the path to change in order to make companies fit for the future. A fact that Prof. Dr. Faix emphasized in his closing speech at the event.

SIBE’s Scientific Symposium with the Steinbeis Foundation and Eurac Research Bolzano gave all participants an interesting insight into the role of leadership in the (digital) future. Disruptive innovations, institutional cooperation and employee empowerment were the focus. However, leadership in a digital world, as a broad complex of topics, goes far beyond these issues, so that with all the new impulses at the event many relevant questions were raised that should be examined and researched in the future.

The Open Access Journal "Leadership, Education, Personality: An Interdisciplinary Journal", published by Springer Verlag, tries to answer some of these questions. The journal publishes scientific articles on topics such as digital transformation, leadership and work design. It was founded at the beginning of 2019 as a cooperation between Springer Verlag and the School of International Business and Entrepreneurship (SIBE) of Steinbeis University.

SIBE is the Graduate School for Leadership & Management at the Steinbeis University. Its teaching and research focuses on Management & Business Leadership and thus on the topics of leadership, personality and innovation, as well as the interdisciplinary areas that arise from the combination of these issues.