Lisa Heldt

Lisa is a PhD researcher at the IIIEE. She investigates how companies drive sustainability in their business models and supply chains by adopting and integrating new technologies, such as smart sensors, blockchain, or satellite technology. Overall, her research takes a qualitative, process-oriented approach with a particular interest in how dynamics and tensions unfold over time and can be navigated effectively.

She explores how large manufacturing companies manage the transition to sustainable, circular and technology-enabled business models within the context of their legacy business and logic of value creation. This includes, for instance, working with a large manufacturing firm in their adoption of a circular, service-based business model that is enabled by smart sensors and provides b2b clients with access over ownership. She is interested in the dynamics and tensions that emerge along the way and how underlying logics and organizational sensemaking shape these business model transformation processes, and how companies manage them effectively.

On the supply chain side, she is particularly interested in complex multi-tier supply chains and the question of how companies monitor and manage impacts on environment, human rights and business across the entire upstream supply chain, beyond just first-tier suppliers. She investigates how companies use technologies and collaborations across the chain to build more visibility, traceability and transparency, as well as which challenges they encounter. Her research explores this, for instance, in the context of satellite monitoring of deforestation in agrifood supply chains (and recently, the role of the EU Deforestation Regulation, EUDR) or in the context of blockchain solutions for traceability of critical minerals like cobalt for electric vehicle batteries.

Her teaching focuses on sustainable supply chain management, human rights and environmental due diligence and emerging technologies for supply chain sustainability. She also supervises master theses connected to these topics.

Lisa holds an M.Sc. Environmental Management and Policy from IIIEE, Lund University and a B.Sc. in Environmental and Sustainability Studies with a minor in Business Psychology from Leuphana University Lüneburg. Besides her academic background, she has gained industry experience in areas such as sustainability in supply chains, management and entrepreneurship through positions at EcoVadis, Tetra Pak, IKEA, BASF, Boehringer Ingelheim and plietsch, her own business.

Publications