8 December 2025

Photo: Yannik Gehrke

A guest lecture by Julian Meier (Roland Berger) provided students with practice-based perspectives on digitalization, drawing on his consulting experience with established firms and professional basketball teams.

A central argument of the lecture was that digitalization generates value only when top decision-makers – whether CEOs or head coaches – actively encourage their teams to translate data-driven insights into concrete action. Without this leadership commitment, analytical findings remain without operational impact. Sustained value creation requires that behavioural change follows from insight.

This argument was illustrated through an example from professional basketball: by identifying latent patterns in offensive rebounds following free throws, a team was able to develop a strategic advantage that had remained undetected by competitors for multiple seasons. The case demonstrated how rigorous data analytics can produce measurable competitive gains, provided that organisations are willing and able to act on what the data reveals.