Leiter des Forschungsfeldes “Unternehmen, Wertschöpfungsketten und Konsum” at the IÖW since 2022 (deputy of the predecessor field Unternehmensführung und Konsum, 2018–2021); at Universität Oldenburg 2004–2018. Diplom-Ökonom, Dr. 2012. Gesellschafter of the institute. He coordinates the IÖW themes Unternehmen und Wertschöpfung and Alternative Ökonomien, and states “seit über 25 Jahren” working scientifically on sustainable business.
Schwerpunkte per his own profile: Unternehmensverantwortung und Nachhaltigkeitsmanagement, Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung, Sozialunternehmertum, Alternative Wirtschaftsformen.
Profiled from the 2026-10-29 crawl of www.ioew.de. No publication of his has been read; see Sources.
Status ⟨2026-10-29⟩
- Ranked second of the three IÖW people with material overlap to SINE — see IÖW → The three. The institute’s reporting-standards anchor and, with Pentzien, the senior person in the relevant field.
- No relationship path recorded.
- He is one of only two people in 110 IÖW profiles whose profile text contains “Zertifiz*” (the other containing term is his own “Lieferkette”) — a thin thread, but the only one of its kind in the house.
Two bodies of work
(a) Reporting and corporate responsibility
- Co-author of the 2026 ESRS report with Schöpflin — see that page for the project.
- Co-leads the Ranking der Nachhaltigkeitsberichte (IÖW × future e.V., running since 1994, 11th round; team incl. Esther Hoffmann, Vivian Frick, Schöpflin, Thomas Korbun). ⟨Inference: a 30-year public assessment series of German sustainability reports is the nearest thing in Germany to an institutional answer to “who judges whether a report is any good” — and it judges reports, not the data inside them.⟩
- Rebound-Effekte: Management und Vermeidung — Leitfaden für Unternehmen (2023, with Öko-Institut, Schaltegger and Schöpflin).
- Member of the We Care steering committee — a management standard for sustainability requirements at sites and in supply-chain management, food sector.
Corporate Digital Responsibility — the nearer bridge
- Beyond direct stakeholders: The extensive scope of Societal Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) — reviewed journal article, 2024, with Saskia Dörr.
- Eine Allianz für CDR bilden: Corporate Digital Responsibility zur Aufgabe der gesamten Wirtschaft machen — IÖW-Impulse, 2024.
- Co-author of the Metastudie “Nachhaltigkeitseffekte der Digitalisierung” (2024, with DIW and Schöpflin) — a critical review of the quantitative measurement of digitalisation’s environmental effects.
⟨Inference, basis: the CDR titles read against SINE’s framing. CDR is the one place in his work where data itself is the object of corporate responsibility rather than a medium for reporting about something else. That is the register in which SINE’s confidentiality question would be legible to him. The papers were not read, so what CDR means in his usage is unverified.⟩
(b) Alternative economies
Was ist Alternativwirtschaft? Vorschlag einer Definition für empirische Untersuchungen (2026) · Die Alternativwirtschaft im Land Bremen (2026, with Gesa Marken) · Metanetzwerk für Alternativökonomie: Verbund Kooperatives Wirtschaften (2025) · Organisationsformen in Bewegung (2025) · Kooperatives Wirtschaften in der Zivilgesellschaft (book, 2024, with Pentzien and others; earlier article version 2021) · Kooperatives Wirtschaften: Den unerkannten Wirtschaftsfaktor unterstützen (IÖW-Impulse, 2025).
Projects in this strand: Soziale Solidarische Ökonomie stärken (Verbund Kooperatives Wirtschaften), Studie zur Vermessung der Alternativwirtschaft im Land Bremen, Teilgabe, EPOS (Energiewende und Gender), EMUSE (Energiegenossenschaften als Multiplikatorinnen für Energiesuffizienz), Quincy.
⟨Inference: the cooperative/civil-society strand is adjacent to Ostrom’s commons governance in subject matter — collective ownership of economic activity — but arrives from the German cooperative tradition rather than from CPR theory. Shared object, different intellectual lineage.⟩
Relevance to SINE
- SINE’s concern begins exactly where his ends. He evaluates the quality of what firms publish; SINE’s instrument is for figures firms will not publish. See confidentiality gap in carbon accounting and decision-grade carbon data criteria.
- The Ranking is the asset. ⟨Inference: whoever has spent 30 years judging the credibility of corporate sustainability reports has an evidence base on where reports are not believable that SINE has no equivalent of. That is the thing worth asking him about, ahead of any cooperation framing.⟩
- Seniority with reach: field head, shareholder, theme coordinator, We Care steering committee. If an institutional relationship with the IÖW were wanted rather than a project-level one, he and Pentzien are the two addresses.
- Caveat: half his output is alternative-economy research with no bearing on SINE at all. He is not a reporting specialist who happens to do other things; the split is roughly even.
Open questions
- What does his CDR work actually claim? The 2024 journal article is the most SINE-legible item in his record and has not been read.
- What has the Ranking found about data credibility across 30 rounds?
Not in
sources/; no round of the ranking has been ingested. - Relationship path. None recorded.
Sources
sources/research/2026-10-29-ioew-person-level-overlap.md§3, §4 — crawl of www.ioew.de, 2026-10-29. All publication claims are from list entries, not from the documents.
See also
- IÖW — his institute
- Patrick Schöpflin — his co-author on ESRS, the Metastudie and Rebound-Effekte
- Jonas Pentzien — co-head of the same research field, co-author on Kooperatives Wirtschaften
- ESG reporting in the financial sector