Overview of our Annual Report
Dear Reader,
In our 2023 Annual Report, we offer you a brief insight into the wide variety of work conducted at our institute last year, updates on new developments and the latest facts and figures.
During a time when we are confronted with major changes and crises, we feel it is vital to meet global challenges with optimism and commitment and to make a decisive contribution to society with our research.
Last year, we not only developed solutions to current problems but also broke new ground. Right at the beginning of the year, we opened our new institute location in Heilbronn, where the Joint Innovation Hub of Fraunhofer ISI conducts research as part of the collaboration with the non-profit Dieter-Schwarz Foundation on the Bildungscampus Heilbronn. Its research here on innovation, digitalization, artificial intelligence, and sustainability is based on strategic foresight and a systemic perspective. The Joint Innovation Hub offers its clients from business, politics, administration, and civil society support throughout the innovation process. This ranges from foresight and inspiration, preparation and participation, supporting innovation, developing new fields of innovation to accompanying transformation.
In more than 400 research projects in 2023, we showed that our institute is not only able to analyze the status quo but can also actively contribute to shaping our future. We present some of our highlight projects as examples in this report.
We directed our research at creating added value for society, for example, by modeling the transformation pathways to achieve the targets set in the Paris Agreement, carrying out impact studies, and ensuring sustainable technology transfer from research to industry – to name just a few.
We must express our gratitude to our employees. Their knowledge of technology, the economy and social sciences, their expertise, and creativity have once again made an essential contribution to our positive annual outcome in terms of the institute’s visibility in academia and the media.
More than 300 people from 25 different countries work at our institute. Their commitment is the key to our economic and social success, and we are proud to work alongside such an interdisciplinary and diverse team.
We would also like to thank our partners and clients. We continue to be highly motivated to advance research and innovation in the future and to work together on the solutions to today’s and tomorrow’s problems. In this way, we can shape a future that is characterized by progress, innovation and sustainability.
We invite you to take a look at our annual report and hope you find it interesting reading.
The Institute’s Directors
As Chair of the Board of Trustees, you are really pleased if the institute is able to turn the formulated visions into reality and achieve its set goals – and this was certainly the case last year. This is clearly evident from the Annual Report and the regular discussions that I had with the institute’s directors over the year. I am especially delighted that we have such a lively and forward-looking Board of Trustees! The final meeting of the year in the fall, for example, was a kind of milestone because we had doctoral students at the institute with their presentations and board members commenting on them on the agenda for the first time. Scientific excellence meets professionals from politics, business, NGOs and academia. This was a really great and lively element of the Board’s work.
Your view of the world expands if you change your perspective. Preparing product, process or business model innovations in a commercial enterprise and accompanying them to successful implementation is definitely different from investigating the phenomenon of innovation scientifically and researching its systemic conditions in a wider context. Innovations are successfully realized ideas and the economy plays an essential part in this success. But of course, there are systems, incentives, and framework conditions that make this success more likely than others – this is what ISI makes you focus on, and my work on the Board has inspired me with lots of ideas in this regard.
Innovations are needed more than ever, otherwise we will not be able to overcome the multitude of geopolitical, social, environmental challenges we are facing – so innovation research will continue to be very important. However, I think that research will continue to develop along the course it has already taken for several years: Firstly, it will become more concrete and will have to deal with the implementation or non-implementation of specific technical or social ideas in order to remain relevant. Secondly - and perhaps to a greater extent than is the case today - it will have to link technical innovations with social acceptance, a task that I believe ISI is well equipped to perform due to the interdisciplinarity of its staff! And thirdly, it must continue to raise its evidence-based voice when facing political decision-makers in order to transfer scientific findings into action. I am therefore particularly pleased that ISI will enhance its presence in Berlin in 2024 with a representative office in the capital.
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Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research ISI
