Panel 1 | Driving Sustainable Innovation – Creating better solutions
14:00 – 15:00 CEST | 26.08.2020
Join us for an interactive panel discussion around sustainable innovation!
Connie D. Hensler
Director of Environmental Management & Product Stewardship
Interface, Inc.
Interface is the world leader in modular flooring and is recognized as a leader in the movement of the industrial community toward environmental sustainability. As Director of Environmental Management and Product Stewardship, Connie collaborates with Product Management, Marketing, and R&D functions to enable introduction of new products, promote responsible product stewardship, optimize the use of technology and external resources to address global regulatory compliance demands, and represents Interface with trade groups, legislative committees, government agencies, and regulatory organizations.
Ms. Hensler is a Life Cycle Assessment Certified Professional (LCACP) and has published research in the Journal of Industrial Ecology and the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. She is a member of the board of directors of the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment.
Prior to her current position, she worked for over ten years in Life Cycle Assessment and twenty years in research and development and holds multiple patents for her work in polymer formulation. Ms. Hensler has a Masters of Science in Applied and Environmental Microbiology from Georgia State University.
Fernando J. Diaz Lopez
Director
Innovation for Sustainable Development Network – inno4sd.net
Fernando Diaz Lopez is the director of the Innovation for Sustainable Development Network (inno4sd.net), an international network that brings together key stakeholders who are interested in innovation for sustainable development. He is also co-founder and strategic advisor of the Mexico-City-based think-thank Eco-innovation Research.
Fernando is a Dutch-Mexican national with over 21 years of work experience – with the mission to actively contribute to high-level decision making and to generate (scientific) evidence in the area of innovation for sustainable development. He is passionate about sustainability and highly committed to the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Until recently Fernando worked for 12 years as a senior advisor/researcher in the area of innovation for sustainable development at TNO, the largest national research institute in the Netherlands.
Florian Lüdeke-Freund
Professor for Corporate Sustainability
ESCP Europe Business School
Florian Lüdeke-Freund is Professor for Corporate Sustainability at ESCP Business School, Berlin, Germany, where he holds the Chair for Corporate Sustainability. He is a Research Fellow at ESCP’s SustBusy Research Center and Leuphana University’s Centre for Sustainability Management (CSM). He also was a Research Fellow at the Governing Responsible Business Research Environment at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Denmark. Prior to joining ESCP Business School, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Hamburg and earned a PhD in social sciences and economics from Leuphana University.
Florian’s research and teaching deal with corporate sustainability management, sustainable entrepreneurship, sustainable business models, and values-based innovation. As well as publishing numerous journal articles, books, and book chapters on these topics, he is Editorial Board Member at Organization & Environment and Co-Editor of several journal special issues (e.g., Business & Society, Organization & Environment, Journal of Cleaner Production, Int. Journal of Innovation Management, Journal of Business Models). Florian founded www.SustainableBusinessModel.org as an international research hub with 25 members from more than 10 countries, and he is an active supporter of the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group at OCAD University, Toronto, Canada. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Universities of St. Gallen (Switzerland), Stellenbosch (South Africa), and Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). In 2020, Florian was called to join Germany’s Circular Economy Initiative, led by the National Academy of Science and Engineering.
