A digital route to more sustainable behavior

February 16, 2023

A course offered by the Department of Information Systems supports the digital sustainability activities of VfB Stuttgart 1893 AG.

This semester, students of the Institute of Business Administration at the University of Stuttgart were given a unique opportunity to apply the knowledge they had acquired during their studies to help solve a problem and promote sustainability awareness. The cooperation partner for this project is VfB Stuttgart.

The following task, which the students received at the event “Management of IT Companies”, served as a starting point for the project:

What digital approaches might be taken to encourage the VFB family to adopt more sustainable behavior?

Design thinking and agile innovation methods

To implement the task, project leader Florian Härer introduced the students to design thinking and agile innovation methods. Key aspects of this included problem analysis, the solution idea, and a prototypical development and evaluation of a digital product based on the review of a business model. At the end of the event, the results were presented using the pitch format. The jury comprised VfB Stuttgart stakeholder (Jannik Finkbohner), institute employees (Prof. Georg Herzwurm, Dr. Lars Mautsch, Kleophas Model) and fellow students.

The results clearly demonstrate that gamification approaches in particular, i.e. game-typical elements used in a non-game context, help to encourage sustainable behavior. The playful approach focused on applications in the fields of mobility, waste disposal, fitness, and health to develop a digital business model prototype. "The event and the module were a complete success and both the students, and the project partner gave us a lot of positive feedback," said Prof. Georg Herzwurm.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Georg Herzwurm, University of Stuttgart, Institute of Business Administration, Department Information Systems II (Software-intensive Business), Tel.: +49 711 685 82384, email

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