Personal Profiles

Professor Walter R. Stahel

Short Biography:

Diploma in architecture and town planning at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH-Z), January 1971.
Project manager at the department of applied economics, Battelle Research Centres, Geneva, 1973-80.
Personal Assistant of the CEO of an industrial holding company with world-wide activities, Geneva 1980-84
Founder-director of the Product-Life Institute at Geneva since 1983.
Director of the risk management programme of the International Association for the Study of Insurance Economics (The Geneva Association) since 1988.

Research Interests:

Product-life analysis and optimisation and its impact on the three pillars of sustainability.
Insurability as the natural border line between Nation States and market economy with regard to innovation and new technologies (insurable risks should not be regulated, uninsurable ones don't have to be regulated)
The performance economy - selling the utilisation of goods instead of the goods as a strategy to create sustainable profits by internalising the costs of risk and the costs of waste.
Developing metrics for resource efficient sustainable investments - value-per-weight and labour input-per-weight as absolute decoupling indicators.
Substituting manpower for energy - developing a regional economy based on the management of existing physical assets (durable goods, buildings, infrastructures).

Research Collaborations:

• Member of the editorial boards of: the Geneva Papers on Risk and Insurance, Issues and Practice; Journal of Industrial Ecology; the Chinese Journal for Population, Resources and Environment. Member of the Advisory Board of: Risk Management International Journal
• Member of the Society for Risk Analysis; founding member of the Factor Ten Club.

Teaching:

• Guest lecturer at Tohoku University, Japan.
• Periodic lectures at Swiss and German Universities, at Wisconsin University Madison, Tokyo University and Tongji University Shanghai.

Selected Publication/Conference Presentations:

Numerous publications and conference presentations have been published in English, German and French.
A number of publications and conference presentations are available on the website http://product-life.org, such as: The Product-Life Factor, Mitchell Prize winning paper, Houston, TX, 1982; The Functional Economy: Cultural and Organizational Change (The Industrial Green Game, National Academy Press, Washington DC, 1997); Arbeitslosigkeit-Beschäftigung-Beruf, GZ prize-winning paper Berlin 1978.
Others are accessible through the internet: The Service Economy: wealth without resource consumption? Royal Society London (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A), vol 355, 1997, 1309-1319; Sufficiency Strategies for a Sustainable and Competitive Economy: Reversed and Inversed Incentives; as well as a number of conference papers (search with Google).

Books:

• The Performance Economy; Palgrave London, 2006; also published in simplified Mandarin 2008.
• The Limits to Certainty, facing risks in the new Service Economy; Kluwer Dordrecht 1989 (with Orio Giarini); also published in French, Italian, German, Japanese and Rumanian.
• Jobs for Tomorrow, substituting manpower for energy. Vantage Press New York, 1982 (with Geneviève Reday)

Television & Radio:

Participated in numerous broadcasts with BBC, German and Swiss television and radio channels since 1980.

Contact Details