Dr. René
H. Reich

I help products and enterprises innovate and transform. I work as a founder, consultant, university lecturer, and researcher. My conviction is straightforward: to stay competitive, enterprises must keep reinventing how they build products and run their operations. Digital technology and AI are the main drivers of that change. Sustainability is a core part of it, because innovation has to be sustainable to last.

Artificial intelligence is central to how I drive innovation. I studied Artificial Intelligence at Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU). I pair that academic grounding with hands-on implementation experience. I build and deploy AI solutions, not just study them. This lets me move from strategy to working products, and from data foundations to applications in use.

As Founder and CEO of Viridives, I provide end-to-end consulting for enterprise innovation and transformation. I help organizations modernize how they work and how they create products — spanning digital platforms, data foundations, and AI-enabled processes. Sustainability runs through this work as one dimension of it, including more than six years of life-cycle assessment practice and product carbon footprinting. I also run certified workshops that make these methods accessible to teams and early-stage startups.

I am an entrepreneur at heart, with two companies of my own. Building ventures from the ground up, across digital and real estate, taught me how to turn an idea into something financed, operational, and lasting. That founder’s perspective shapes how I advise others on innovation and growth.

Beyond my own ventures, I have led cross-functional projects, built and mentored teams, and managed stakeholders across industry, government, and academia on three continents. I am trained in project management, business development, and change management.

As a university lecturer in digitalization, I teach the technologies behind modern data-driven and AI systems. I focus on how these technologies turn into real products, applications, and businesses.

My research keeps me at the frontier of enterprise innovation. As an Information Systems researcher, I study how digital platforms create value and enable new business and operating models, including the circular economy and Digital Product Passports (DPP). This builds on my published work on Green Information Systems, AI, and life-cycle assessment.