In its study “Innovation Champion of Sustainability”, the IMWF** (Institut für Management- und Wirtschaftsforschung – Institute for Management and Economic Research) used so-called “social listening” to analyze and evaluate the innovation, research and development as well as ecological, social and economic sustainability of approximately 10,300 companies. Social listening is the method of finding and evaluating what people are saying about a company, person, product, or brand online. Around 750 companies were ultimately named sustainable across all industries. 268 companies were from the mechanical and plant engineering industry, of which only 32 were recognized as sustainable. Busch achieved 6th place with a score of 79.4 out of 100.

Approximately 3,5 million sources from news pages, websites, forums, important social media channels, consumer pages, press releases and blogs published between September 16, 2021, and September 15, 2022, were used for the sustainability analysis.

Only German-language statements from German domains were considered. The data was first split into text fragments using artificial intelligence. Each text fragment was analyzed to determine which company and topic it was about and how the section should be evaluated.

Innovation, research and development each accounted for 25% of the analysis. Ecological, economic and social sustainability were considered for 50% of the evaluation.

*The F.A.Z.-Institut für Management-, Markt- und Medieninformationen GmbH (Institute for Management, Market and Media Information) is a company of the renowned Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung publishing group.

**The IMWF (Institut für Management- und Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH – Institute for Management and Economic Research) is a leading specialist in the field of analysis of very large amounts of data from communication using artificial intelligence. It belongs to the factor account group.