Prof. Dr. Gerhard Satzger is leading the research group "Digital Service Innovation".  His career reflects essential objectives of his group that is also embedded in the "industry-on-campus" Karlsruhe Service Research Institute (KSRI): interdisciplinarity and the interlock between academia and industry:  Gerhard Satzger has managed to switch between both worlds throughout his career.  In addition to his academic qualifications and experience, he can draw upon a long standing record in national and international leadership positions in the IT industry.

His research centers around conceiving and developing digital services and corresponding business models - with a particular focus on human-centric design for services as well as on services that extract value from data via Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Prof. Dr. Satzger has obtained a diploma in Business Engineering from the University of Karlsruhe and an MBA from Oregon State University/USA. In 1993, he completed a Ph.D. program at the University of Giessen, before he earned his “Habilitation” from the University of Augsburg based on his work on „Capital Intensive Services in Global Markets“.

In 1989, Dr. Satzger joined IBM and initially held several consulting and financial management positions. Later, he spent time as assistant professor at the University of Augsburg before returning to IBM Germany as head of controlling in 1998. From 2001 to 2002 he ran the central planning group for IBM Europe/Middle East/Africa, based in Paris. From 2003 onwards, he was CFO of Global Technology Services in Germany - IBM's business unit that included the IT outsourcing business as well as technical infrastructure projects. In 2008, Dr. Satzger co-founded the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute, a joint institution of IBM and the University of Karlsruhe, as well as the new research group “Digital Service Innovation”. Between 2011 and 2014, Dr. Satzger led a research-prone unit of IBM in Europe (IBM Business Performance Services) and managed global business analytics projects targeting enterprise transformation by enabling data-driven decisions.  Effective August 2014, Dr. Satzger returned to KIT and also served as director of KSRI up to 2022.

Although spending just parts of his career in academia, Dr. Satzger has authored more than 150 articles in the area of information systems and service science, many published in renowned journals (e.g., Journal of Service Management, Business and Information Systems Engineering, Information System Frontiers, Computers in Human Behavior, Electronic Markets, Services Industries Journal, International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems) and conferences (e.g., IJCAI, ICIS, ICSOC, HICCS, ECIS, IEEE CBI). He has intensively worked with a variety of industry partners in individual projects and as part of larger research consortia (e.g., ABB, Altran, BASF, Bayer, Bosch, Ceratizit, Daimler, Festo, GEA, HDM, HUK-Coburg, IBM, Plansee, Porsche, RWE, USU, SEW, TecAlliance, Trelleborg, Trumpf, and others).

Dr. Satzger has received a variety of awards throughout his career, e.g. fellowship in the German National Academic Foundation, personal research grants from the State of Bavaria and Datev, nomination for IBM’s Golden Circle, the IBM Faculty Award, Best paper awards (HICSS, IUI) and several recognitions of KIT for teaching quality. He serves on various boards and committees, e.g., the economic advisory board of HUK-Coburg and the German Association of Law and Informatics (DGRI), the boards of the global SUGAR Network for Human-Centered Design and the German Forum on Service Research (DF2) as well as the workgroup “Growth and International Management” of the Schmalenbach-Gesellschaft.