Prof. Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund develops the research and transfer area of Sustainable Business Models under the umbrella of the Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability. This initiative is part of the research alliance between the Borderstep Institute and ESCP Business School Berlin, which was launched in August 2024.

Florian Lüdeke-Freund is a Professor for Corporate Sustainability at ESCP Business School Berlin. He earned his PhD at the Centre for Sustainability Management (CSM) (under Prof. Stefan Schaltegger) at Leuphana University with a dissertation on “Business Models for Sustainability Innovation: Conceptual Foundations and the Case of Solar Energy” (2013). He later completed his habilitation at the Chair of Capital Markets & Corporate Governance (under Prof. Alexander Bassen) at the University of Hamburg with a thesis titled “Business Models for Sustainability: Exploring a New Concept for Corporate Sustainability Research” (2019).

For over fifteen years, his research and teaching have focused on topics such as corporate sustainability management, sustainable entrepreneurship, and business models. He is the founder and Academic Director of the MSc. programme in Sustainability Entrepreneurship & Innovation. Most recently, he founded the ESCP Centre for Sustainability Transformation & Applied Research (STAR Centre) as a platform for science-practice transfer.

Florian Lüdeke-Freund is a member of the Editorial Review Board at Organization & Environment, was an Associate Editor at the Journal of Business Models, and served as co-chair of the New Business Models conference series. Through numerous widely-cited publications on sustainable business models, he regularly contributes to the advancement of this research field.

He has completed guest stays at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) (under Prof. Rolf Wüstenhagen), Stellenbosch University (South Africa) (under Prof. Mark Swilling), and Copenhagen Business School (Denmark) (under Prof. Esben Rahbek Gjerdrum Pedersen). He frequently delivers lectures and guest lectures at various international universities and business schools.