Berlin-based non-university sustainability research institute, founded 1985, ~69 staff. Member of Ecornet, the network of eight independent German sustainability research institutes — the same peer group as Ecologic Institut. Profiled here after a full crawl of its website at Martin Pompéry’s request, with the question put at the level of individual people: who at this institute works on something SINE works on?
The short answer is in the null scan: nobody, in SINE’s own vocabulary. The longer answer is that three people sit one step away on the same object — see The three.
The institute
- Founded 1985; the site frames itself as “seit 40 Jahren” at Zukunftsfragen.
- 69 staff at end of 2024 (50 scientific, 19 non-scientific), excluding students and interns. Peak 73 in 2022, the highest since founding; declining since. The institute states it “verfolgt keine Wachstumsstrategie” and throttles proposal volume when utilisation is good — an explicit anti-growth posture, unusual enough to be worth recording.
- Leadership: Thomas Korbun (scientific MD), Stefanie Freier (commercial MD). A Vorstand accompanies strategy; a scientific advisory board accompanies the work.
- Research fields (the organisational axis): Unternehmen, Wertschöpfungsketten und Konsum; Umweltökonomie und Umweltpolitik; Nachhaltige Energiewirtschaft und Klimaschutz. Themes (the editorial axis) additionally include Digitaler Wandel, Energiewende, Innovation und Technologien, Klimaschutz und Anpassung, Natur und Ökosysteme, Politik und Governance, Alternative Ökonomien.
The shareholder structure — the structural point
The IÖW’s Gesellschafter*innen are ~50 named individuals — current and former researchers, plus professors at other universities — together with the Vereinigung für ökologische Wirtschaftsforschung e.V. (VÖW). All three people below are shareholders in the institute they work for.
⟨Inference, basis: the shareholder list read against the anti-growth statement. This is a researcher-owned institute, not a foundation or a state-backed body. Two consequences worth holding: the people are the institution in a way that does not hold for a GmbH with an external owner, so a person-level relationship is the institutional relationship; and an institute that owns itself and declines to grow has no acquisition pressure to convert into a partnership.⟩
One name on the shareholder list is Andreas Kraemer — the founder of the Ecologic Institut. The Ecornet peer group overlaps at the level of ownership, not only of network membership.
The null scan — why this page reads the way it does
All 110 published profile pages were scanned in full for SINE’s vocabulary. Occurrences, by number of profiles:
Zero: Datenraum / data space, Gaia-X, Catena-X, Produktpass / DPP, CSRD, ESRS, Scope 3, Blockchain, Kryptograf*, Zero-knowledge, Rückverfolg*, Interoperab*, Datensouveränität, Datenökonomie, Datenteilung / data sharing, Vertraulich*.
Non-zero: Berichterstattung 5 · Lieferkette 2 · Ökobilanz 2 · Zertifiz* 1 · Commons 1 · Künstliche Intelligenz 1 · Industrie 4.0 1.
Not one person at the IÖW describes themselves in the vocabulary of data infrastructure. “ESRS” and “CSRD” score zero despite the institute running a multi-year ESRS accompaniment project — the regulation is project vocabulary here, not identity vocabulary.
The term that matters most is the one with zero hits: vertraulich. The problem SINE’s whole instrument answers — see confidentiality gap in carbon accounting — is not a problem anyone at this institute has named.
The asymmetry in one line: the IÖW asks whether and why firms report; SINE asks how a reported figure can be believed without disclosure. Adjacent on the same object, not competing.
The three people who matter
Ranked by closeness to something this wiki already has a page for. All three sit in the same research field, Unternehmen, Wertschöpfungsketten und Konsum.
| Person | Position | Nearest SINE page | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Patrick Schöpflin | Wiss. Mitarbeiter | ESG reporting, nature-related reporting frameworks |
| 2 | Christian Lautermann | Forschungsfeldleiter | ESG reporting |
| 3 | Jonas Pentzien | Forschungsfeldleiter | Data Commons, Ostrom |
The tail — Esther Hoffmann, Manon Filler, Katharina Wagner (Berichterstattung), Kathrin Ankele (Lieferkette), Hannes Bluhm, Yve Andraos (Ökobilanz), Rolf Bräuer (KI) — carries one keyword adjacency each and no second one. Not read in depth; not candidates.
Shared artefacts
- ESRS accompaniment project — Weiterentwicklung europäischer Nachhaltigkeitsberichtsstandards für Unternehmen, Schöpflin (first author) + Lautermann, report 2026. Derives material environmental impacts per sector; tests whether the cross-cutting standards are compatible with supply-chain due-diligence duties; names gaps and inconsistencies.
- Ranking der Nachhaltigkeitsberichte — IÖW × future e.V., running since 1994, 11th round. Team incl. Lautermann, Esther Hoffmann, Vivian Frick, Schöpflin, Korbun. ⟨Inference: a 30-year public assessment series of German sustainability reports is the institute’s single most reputationally loaded asset in SINE’s adjacent space — it is the German answer to “who judges whether a report is any good”.⟩
- Metastudie “Nachhaltigkeitseffekte der Digitalisierung” (2024, Lautermann + Schöpflin, with DIW) — critical review of the quantitative measurement of digitalisation’s environmental effects.
Strategic relevance to SINE
A cooperation candidate, not a competitor — the same verdict as Ecologic Institut, reached by a different route. Ecologic at least names data governance as a research strand; the IÖW does not name it at all. There is no contested ground.
What the IÖW has that SINE does not:
- Standing inside the ESRS text. Schöpflin works on what the standard must contain. SINE works on how a number inside it is made credible. Neither side holds the other’s half. See product-level carbon regulation.
- A 30-year assessment franchise (the Ranking) and the German corporate-reporting audience that comes with it.
- Platform-governance scholarship in Pentzien — ownership and legitimation of shared digital infrastructure, which is the political half of the question Data Commons answers institutionally.
What SINE has that the IÖW does not: anything that runs. The cross-cutting finding from the 2026-10-29 Ecornet survey holds here in its strongest form — this peer group researches, builds methodology or runs pilots; the IÖW does the first two and not even the third in SINE’s area.
Two caveats against over-reading this page.
- ⟨Inference: a reporting institute with no confidentiality vocabulary may be uninterested in SINE’s instrument rather than merely unaware of it. The IÖW’s normative position is that firms should disclose. An instrument whose purpose is to make disclosure unnecessary can read, from inside that position, as helping firms avoid transparency. This is a predictable objection and is not evidenced in any source — but it is the objection to prepare for.⟩
- No IÖW publication has been read. Every characterisation above rests on self-descriptions, project pages and publication list entries.
Sources
sources/research/2026-10-29-ioew-person-level-overlap.md— full crawl of www.ioew.de (110 profile pages, research fields, per-person publication and project lists for the three, four project detail pages, five institutional pages), the complete null scan, and the stated limits. Research-grade: headcount, founding year and shareholder list are the institute’s own self-description, not the annual report. Verify before external use.sources/research/2026-10-29-german-sustainability-research-institutes.md— the Ecornet peer-group survey in which the IÖW was the reference point but was not itself profiled.
See also
- Ecologic Institut — the other Ecornet member with a page here; shares a shareholder (Kraemer)
- Patrick Schöpflin · Christian Lautermann · Jonas Pentzien
- Confidentiality gap in carbon accounting — the term with zero hits across 110 profiles
- ESG reporting in the financial sector