Special issue in Journal of Business Economics

Together with his colleagues Matthias Klumpp (Universität Bremen), Frank Meisel (Universität Kiel), Christian Thies (TU Hamburg) und Thomas Volling, Prof. Udo Buscher (Chair of Business Administration, esp. Industrial Management at TU Dresden and supervisor of the doctoral project H2 - "Coordination in hydrogen value creation networks from an actor-centered perspective") is publishing a special issue on Hydrogen supply chains (HSCs), which will appear in the renowned Journal of Business Economics at the end of the year.

With this special issue, we are addressing an important research and management topic for at least three reasons: First, at least green hydrogen is expected to play a pivotal role in decarbonizing economies and societies globally and, therefore, support mid- to long-term climate protection efforts. This will lead to unprecedented levels of hydrogen demand, posing manifold managerial challenges to production, storage, transportation, and distribution. Second, depending on the design, HSCs must either be built and designed from scratch (greenfield approach), or existing infrastructure must be used or retrofitted during configuration (brownfield approach). The increasing availability of information makes it possible to substantiate design concepts and decisions in an unprecedented way. Third, new global supply chain settings are demanding new attention towards resilience and security aspects to be incorporated in operations and management decisions, especially concerning, for example, sourcing, location, and transport mode or route decisions.

Previous research has already outlined that these upcoming and modern-day management challenges concerning decision support methodology and differentiation of settings and timeline perspectives are complex and demanding. Design and configuration issues are, first and foremost, relevant. However, they are complemented by other issues such as technology selection, legal and public finance frameworks or demand forecasting, production allocation planning, inventory decisions, and pricing decisions.

The link to the special issue is: https://link.springer.com/collections/fgaehigfie.