Innovation Leaders 2026: Why the future of CAPEX decisions is becoming mathematical

For mAInthink GmbH, participation in the F.A.Z. Institute - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Innovation Leaders 2026 was much more than a traditional industry event. As a partner of the event, mAInthink took the opportunity to engage in intensive discussions with CEOs, managing directors and decision-makers about the future of strategic investment decisions.

Sascha Rissel, CEO of mAInthink GmbH and optimization consultant, held numerous interesting discussions with business leaders from various sectors - from industry and infrastructure to real estate and capital-intensive transformation fields.

A recurring pattern emerged: many companies are facing the same challenges - rising investment volumes, limited budgets, increasing uncertainty, complex multi-year planning and a lack of transparency regarding opportunity costs.

Behavioral economics: why expertise alone is not enough

A central topic of many discussions was the increasing relevance of behavioral economics or behavioral economic decision research.

In recent decades, several Nobel Prizes in economics have been awarded to researchers whose work has a strong connection to behavioral economics, bounded rationality, decision-making behavior under uncertainty and cognitive biases - including Daniel Kahneman, Robert Shiller and Richard Thaler.

The key finding is as simple as it is relevant for companies: Even highly qualified managers, expert panels and investment committees do not always make decisions completely rationally or optimally.

This is not due to a lack of competence, but to human limitations: limited information processing, cognitive biases, silo thinking, political dynamics and the sheer complexity of exponentially growing decision-making spaces.

Even with just a few investment projects, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially. While people set priorities, compare scenarios or use empirical values, a complete simultaneous evaluation of all realistic portfolio options becomes practically impossible.

From behavioral economics to mathematical decision intelligence

This is precisely where mAInthink's StratePlan® comes in.

mAInthink has succeeded in mathematically describing central patterns of behavioral economic decision boundaries and combining them with combinatorial optimization, hybrid AI and modern computing architecture.

StratePlan®not only analyses individual projects or prioritizes lists. The solution calculates the combinatorial decision space and identifies the economically optimal starting point for strategic investment decisions under real restrictions.

StratePlan® combines

• mathematical combinatorial optimization
• Hybrid AI methods
• Behavioral economics-based decision logic
• Budget, resource, risk and dependency restrictions
• Multi-threaded computing for the parallel calculation of large decision spaces

The result is a new quality of strategic decision support: the calculation of the optimal starting point for CAPEX investments, multi-year strategy planning and investments in fixed assets.

Instead of relying exclusively on experience, political coordination or isolated business cases, StratePlan®enables a mathematically sound view of capital allocation - with the aim of maximizing economic impact under real restrictions.

Making opportunity costs visible

One of the strongest reactions in the discussions with CEOs and managing directors related to a point that often remains invisible in traditional investment processes: Opportunity costs.

Every investment decision not only generates costs, but also the loss of all alternatives not chosen. It is precisely this loss of value that remains hidden in many organizations.

The central question is often:

What value do companies lose through the currently selected project combination?

StratePlan®reveals which project combination generates the highest economic leverage under given restrictions - and which opportunity costs arise when companies choose a suboptimal combination.

It often turns out that it is not the projects themselves that are wrong, but their combination.

Conclusion: Leads arise where decision-making pressure meets mathematical clarity

The discussions at the F.A.Z. Institute Innovation Leaders 2026 clearly showed that companies are looking for new ways to make complex investment decisions more transparent, more resilient and more economically effective.

For mAInthink, the event was therefore not only a strong innovation format, but also relevant access to decision-makers who are facing precisely these challenges.

Topics such as CAPEX optimization, multi-year planning, fixed-asset strategies, portfolio decisions and the question of how opportunity costs can be made visible in investment decisions were in particularly high demand.

This is precisely where StratePlan® comes in: Companies do not receive yet another reporting solution, but a mathematically sound basis for decision-making in order to deploy capital more efficiently and achieve better results under real restrictions.

The most important question is therefore no longer just: Which projects should we implement?

But rather: Which combination of our projects generates the highest economic leverage under real restrictions?

StratePlan®answers precisely this question - mathematically, transparently and in a decision-oriented manner.