An interview with Steinbeis Entrepreneur Professor Dr.-Ing. Manfred Norbert Fisch
Businesses are currently facing unprecedented challenges, among them the skills shortage and the rise in red tape. Proactive strategies are thus more important than ever, not least because the challenges also harbor opportunities that are begging to be seized. Steinbeis Entrepreneur and energy expert Professor Dr.-Ing. Manfred Norbert Fisch talks to TRANSFER about how businesses can strengthen their innovation performance and maintain their competitiveness, and about the role that knowledge and technology transfer can play in this context.
Neue Weststadt electrolyzer Photo: Maximilian Kamps, Agentur Blumberg GmbH
Professor Fisch, what are the challenges currently facing businesses and which developments will be particularly important in the future?
One of the greatest challenges that businesses are already facing today is the ongoing skills shortage, especially in engineering – and this is only going to get worse in the future. There are currently around 150,000 unfilled engineering vacancies in Germany. And this shortfall would be even greater without skilled professionals from abroad. There is a desperate shortage of engineers, particularly in fields that are important for the future, such as power and electrical engineering.
The rise in red tape is another challenge. I regard the EU’s ESG regulations as particularly excessive and unhelpful to companies trying to compete in a global market. The plethora of new and revised EU regulations requires time-consuming adjustments in the individual member states. 322 new regulations were adopted in 2023 alone, an average of one per working day. It’s hard to see how this can really make European and especially German industry more competitive.
While digitalization has already been successfully implemented in many companies, only time will tell whether artificial intelligence can fulfill European industry’s high expectations. We can only hope that the increased automation enabled by the effort and successes in research does not result in further job losses, as has already happened with the move to electric vehicles and the offshoring of key future technologies such as solar panel and power storage system production.
I just hope Germany can rediscover the virtues of “rolling your sleeves up and getting on with it” – things that used to be a given. Today, negotiations between employers and employees all too often focus on topics like higher pay, more time off and working from home. We can’t carry on like this in the long term if we want to maintain high welfare spending and our current levels of prosperity. I know from my experience as an entrepreneur – I run two Steinbeis Enterprises and two engineering firms in Braunschweig and Stuttgart – that we’ve been in a “war for talent” for several years now. We have an outstanding, committed team of around 150 employees working on cutting-edge energy topics. But we still keep losing skilled professionals to large corporations, especially in the Stuttgart area, who lure them away with above-average salaries and attractive time-off arrangements. That hurts, not least because – especially in the Steinbeis Enterprises – we provide our employees with extensive, practical training. We may not be able to match the high salaries, but we do offer exciting project work in an exceptional working environment.
The Federal Government’s budgetary constraints are also translating directly into a reduction in the funding available for power engineering. To address this challenge, together with our team we have ramped up our development efforts in new areas in the hope of increasing the number of successful funding applications. In particular, we’re focusing on a broad-based approach to achieving net zero in the building and industrial sectors.
What can SMEs do today to ensure they are as well-prepared as possible for these future challenges?
In my view, the main pressures on SMEs at the moment come from energy policy, the associated high energy prices, and the plethora of regulations and laws. In some cases, businesses have to assign employees to deal with all this government red tape who could otherwise be contributing productively to the company’s success. One example is the Building Energy Act (GEG), which regulates the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the buildings sector and runs to almost 180 pages and some 100 articles. On top of this, you have extensive DIN standards that are frequently updated and are often difficult to put into practice.
To remain competitive in the long run, SMEs must regularly ask themselves whether their products or services will still be in demand and commercially viable in five to ten years’ time. Products, systems and processes that burn fossil fuels are one example. The requirement to defossilize the energy supply in order to meet Germany’s climate targets is enshrined in the Federal Climate Change Act. However, the deadline for achieving the targets within the next two decades is extremely ambitious.
What role will knowledge and technology transfer play?
If Germany is to retain its position as a leading exporter, the quality and reliability of German-made technology must be maintained and enhanced. Knowledge and technology transfer is key in this context, and the Steinbeis Network plays an important role. With its extensive expertise, it has proven to be a valuable partner for SMEs, especially when it comes to testing new processes, methods, products and systems in R&D projects and successfully translating them into practical applications.
Your Steinbeis Enterprises have been successfully implementing projects for 28 years. How do you plan to keep adding value and focusing on the future going forward?
Our first projects in the 1990s involved knowledge transfer from our R&D projects on the technical use of solar power to the first solar villages with seasonal thermal energy storage systems. We tested almost a hundred non-residential buildings and found that the planned energy efficiency and user comfort performance targets were often not being met in practice. This led our network to develop highly efficient technical monitoring and operational optimization methods that now offer a return on investment in under two years (www.synavision.de).
Unfortunately, the property sector is still not doing enough to leverage this enormous potential to reduce its carbon footprint.
Our current focus is on defossilizing the energy supply in the buildings sector. Eight years ago, we developed one of the first net-zero neighborhoods in Esslingen. Since then, we’ve produced net-zero feasibility studies for about half a dozen other neighborhoods. In partnership with the Esslingen municipal utility company and an SME called Polarstern, we’ve also initiated, supported and monitored the success of a pilot project to produce green hydrogen. We demonstrated that the hydrogen electrolysis process is able to achieve almost 80% efficiency by using its waste heat to heat buildings in a local neighborhood. Drawing on this pilot project and with support from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, we’re working on studies relating to the transformation of decentralized hydrogen production with integrated waste heat recovery in various settings, including municipal sewage treatment plants.
Our work in these areas leaves us very strongly positioned going forward. The policy goal of achieving net-zero emissions in Europe poses enormous challenges for the buildings sector. But, in keeping with our motto of “walking the walk”, we will keep tackling these challenges with passion and drive. Together with four of our colleagues, in November 2024 we launched an initiative called “Praxispfad CO2-Reduktion im Gebäudesektor” that outlines a practical trajectory for reducing the buildings sector’s carbon footprint. Our manifesto calls for climate impact to be prioritized rather than just energy efficiency (https://www.gdw. de/paradigmenwechsel-in-der-klima- politik-des-gebaeudesektors/).
Contact
Univ.-Prof. Dr.-Ing. Manfred Norbert Fisch (interviewee)
Steinbeis Entrepreneur
Steinbeis Innovation Center energieplus (Braunschweig/Stuttgart)
www.siz-energieplus.de
Steinbeis Transfer Center for Energy, Building and Solar Engineering (Stuttgart)
www.stz-egs.de