Explore Value-based Engineering
VBE is an Award-Winning Approach
Value-based Engineering (VBE) is standardized in ISO/IEC/IEEE 24748-7000 Model Process for Addressing Ethical Concerns During System Design.
It is a highly practical, tested and certifiable approach to human-centered engineering. It makes organizations aware of the human and social challenges but also supreme innovation opportunities inherent in their IT systems. It is a successor of Value Sensitive Design and provides tangible substance to those who commit to Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR).
VBE provides a structured and transparent way to translate value principles into IT system requirements ensuring that product management and technical units collaborate towards stakeholder value, minimal risk and legal compliance.
A Structured Path to Responsible Innovation
Value-based Engineering (VBE) offers a clear and actionable process. In three distinct phases, it helps teams move from understanding their system’s context to making ethically aligned design decisions — step by step.
Concept & Context Exploration
Clarify what the system is, and in what world it operates.
Value Exploration
Explore shared values by combining strategic reflection with practical stakeholder insights.
Ethically Aligned Design
Translate values into technical and organizational decisions.
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.
Learn more about VBE
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 a video resource list covering various aspects of Value-based Engineering and Digital Ethics.
VBE in Practice
The VBE Academy’s knowledge on AI cases and ethical IT is based on 10 years of research and case studies, leadership in the ISO/IEC/IEEE 24748-7000 project and many company partner experiences. This knowledge has also been published in highly renown scientific outlets as well as practitioner publications.
How AI Learns the Bundeswehr's 'Innere Führung'
Yvonne Hofstetter and Joseph Verbovszky (2023)
Der digitale Impact Ihrer Organisation
Martin Giesswein, Yvonne Pirkner, Martin Rohla, Barbara Stöttinger
VBE in Research
The Power of Ethics: Uncovering Technology Risks and Positive Value Potentials in IT Innovation Planning
Kathrin Bednar and Sarah Spiekermann (2023)
Bridging ethics and technology design: A value-based approach to IT innovation
Kathrin Bednar (2023)
A Concept for Evaluating Value-oriented Frameworks in Software Engineering
Till Winkler (2023)
Eliciting Values for Technology Design with Moral Philosophy: An Empirical Exploration of Effects and Shortcomings
Kathrin Bednar and Sarah Spiekermann (2021)
A Telemedicine Case Study for the early phases of Value based Engineering
Sarah Spiekermann, Till Winkler and Kathrin Bednar (2019)
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.