Explore Value-based Engineering
Explore value-based Engineering
A Proven Path to Responsible Innovation
Value-based Engineering (VBE) offers a clear and actionable process, alongside useful tools. In three distinct phases, it helps teams move from understanding their system’s context, through analyzing risks to making ethically aligned design decisions. Step by step.
Value Exploration
Explore shared values by combining strategic reflection with practical stakeholder insights.
Latest Insights & Perspectives
Explore articles, interviews, and event recaps
How can VBE help organizations to reliably build systems that align with ethical values? Discover background and success stories from our partners and clients, and become part of a community driving ethical innovation.
More than a process
The VBE toolbox
VBE and ISO 24748-7000 are a powerful tool to work on challenges relating to ethical or social concerns, as well as on compliance. It is a modular, applicable system of different tools which help you to address concerns over the whole system lifecycle. Find out what’s inside and explore how each tool contributes to your results.
Explore VBE Resources
Why do we need VBE?
Sarah Spiekermann explains the reason Value-based Engineering (VBE) is needed. This is the first part of the VBE lecture.
True Progress and Digital Ethics
Delve into the world of Digital Ethics and learn how values are the key to wellbeing in a digital world.
Want to learn more?
To support your learning journey, we have prepared list of resoruces covering various aspects of Value-based Engineering and Digital Ethics.
Who we are for
How can you benefit from VBE?
The 10 Principles of VBE
VBE is a system development and life-cycle approach to IT innovation following 10 principles.
1. Ecosystem Responsibility
Value-based Engineering organizations embrace responsibility for their technical ecosystem. They abstain from partnerships or external services over which they have no control and which they cannot access.
2. Stakeholder Inclusiveness
Value-based Engineering organizations envision and plan their systems in honest and open cooperation with an extended group of direct and indirect stakeholder representatives, including critical ones.
3. Context-Sensitivity
Innovation teams in Value-based Engineering organizations deeply understand the context of their systems’ deployment and anticipate its effects. In doing so they imagine what happened if one day they were a monopoly.
4. Value Identification with Moral Philosophy and/or Spiritual Tradition
Value-based Engineering organizations use moral philosophies for value elicitation, covering utilitarianism, virtue ethics and duty ethics; complemented by a culture-specific philosophical or spiritual framework from the region of the world in which a system is deployed.
5. Understanding values at depth
Value-based Engineering does not only elicit values from stakeholder concerns and context analysis, but delves deeply into them conceptually to gain a complete understanding of how they may play out in system deployment.
6. Leadership Engagement
Corporate leaders engage in introspection and support only those core values as future system principles that they would want to become universal and are therefore willing to publicly endorse.
7. Respect for Regional Laws and International Agreements
Value-based Engineering organizations respect that the ethical principles embedded in laws and signed agreements of target markets provide the outer boundary condition for their own action and therefore do not prioritize their own system values over and above these.
8. Willingness to renounce Investment
Value-based Engineering organizations actively consider not investing in a system if there are ethical grounds for such renunciation.
9. Transparency of the Value Mission
Value-based Engineering organizations publish an Ethical Policy Statement. This value-mission statement summarizes the value-priorities committed to in a system and is openly endorsed by organizational leaders. They also build up an Ethical Value Register that allows project management and auditors to recap over time what the value effects were that the system sought to cater to, and what levels of control were chosen by engineers to address likely value threats.
10. Risk-based System Design
Value-based Engineering organizations derive Ethical Value Quality Requirements (EVRs) for all core values they pursue, which then co-determine the long-term engineering roadmap. They seek to generally accommodate a “risk-thinking” in their established design and development processes.