Directors

Jens Strüker is Professor for Information Systems and Digital Energy Management at the University of Bayreuth and one of the directors of the Fraunhofer Blockchain Lab. He also holds a leading position in the Project Group Business and Information Systems Engineering of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT) and is deputy scientific director of the Research Center Finance & Information Management (FIM).

In research, teaching and practice Prof. Strüker investigates the potential of digital technologies for the (energy) industry. He is concerned with the question of which degrees of freedom information technologies offer for a real-time energy economy and for effective climate protection. Today, millions of decentralized renewable systems, heat pumps, stationary electricity storage systems and electric vehicles are excluded from direct and active market participation. Digital machine identities promise, for example, that systems can automatically decide when and to what extent they participate in the markets based on user preferences. A small industrial electricity storage unit can thus switch between own consumption, grid-supporting measures or participation in wholesale trading within minutes. Technologies such as machine learning, 5G or blockchain enable such active electricity market participation and thus the digitalization of electricity markets. The challenges here range from technical interoperability to the integration of local energy markets and the creation of a future-oriented market design.

Prof. Strüker is engaged in publicly funded and privately financed applied research projects in order to apply the latest research findings to solve practice-relevant problems. In doing so, he works intensively with corporations, small and medium-sized companies as well as with associations and think tanks. He is a member of various advisory boards of start-ups and supervisory boards. Prof. Strüker is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Wirtschaftsrat der CDU e.V., scientific member of the Advisory Board of the Energy Web Foundation and of the Advisory Board of Euroforum/Handelsblatt. Furthermore, Prof. Strüker is a regular keynote speaker at events in Europe, Asia and North America with lectures such as ‘The Way to a Real-time Energy Economy’ (European Commission High-Level Meeting ‘Interoperability to create the Internet of Energy’, 2017), ‘The Promise of Blockchain to Change the Utility and Oil & Gas Industries’ (International SAP Conference for Utilities, 2017) and ‘The Promise of Cryptonetworks to Change the Energy System’ (New York Association for Energy Economics, 2018).

Prof. Strüker regularly presents results on the issues he is investigating in international journals and conferences such as the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE), the International Conference on Information System (ICIS), the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). In addition, Prof. Strüker is involved in the International Information Systems Community as a popular reviewer.

Prof. Strüker has a degree in economics and history (M.A.). In 2005, he completed his doctorate in Information Systems at the Institute for Informatics and Society (IIG) at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg with summa cum laude. He was then employed as a postdoctoral fellow at the IIG in Freiburg until 2012. After a research stay at the SAP Labs in Palo Alto, CA, USA (2008 – 2009), he habilitated in 2012 with the venia legendi in business informatics and economics. From 2013 to 2020 Prof. Strüker held the Süwag endowed professorship at the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences and was founder and director of the Institute of Energy Economics (INEWI) in Frankfurt. Prof. Strüker is married and has four children.