Sascha Rissel (mAInthink) as CME Member at the World Economic Forum

Contribution to the discussion on decision quality and complex investment portfolios

The discussion about better decision-making processes in business and politics is becoming increasingly important worldwide. Organizations today face the challenge of making strategic investment decisions under uncertainty and growing complexity. Against this backdrop, Sascha Rissel, CEO of the DeepTech company mAInthink, has been accepted as a CME Member (Community Member) of the World Economic Forum network.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) is regarded as one of the most important international platforms for exchange between business, science and politics. Current economic, technological and social issues are discussed there in various thematic networks.

Contribution to the discussion on decision-making quality

As an entrepreneur and management consultant, Sascha Rissel has been working for many years on the question of why investment decisions in companies often do not lead to the best possible results.

A central theme of his contributions to the WEF network is:

Why are many investment portfolios mathematically suboptimal?

The focus here is on the question of how the global optimum can be calculated within complex investment decisions and why classic decision-making processes often only produce local rather than globally optimal solutions in practice.

Complexity of modern investment decisions

Today, companies often have to decide on a large number of possible investments at the same time, such as infrastructure projects, digitalization programmes, production facilities or strategic innovation initiatives. At the same time, these projects are usually faced with limited budgets, resources and time capacities.

In such situations, highly complex decision-making spaces arise in which not only individual projects have to be evaluated, but above all their combination within an overall investment portfolio. As the number of possible projects increases, the number of potential portfolio combinations grows exponentially.

In practice, however, investment decisions are often made on the basis of individual business cases, sequential evaluations or management-driven prioritizations. As a result, many possible combinations remain unconsidered, even though they could lead to a higher overall economic or strategic benefit.

Calculating the global optimum

A central topic of Sascha Rissel's contributions in the WEF environment therefore concerns the question of how the global optimum can be identified within complex investment decisions. This refers to the best possible combination of projects under given restrictions, such as budget limits, resource bottlenecks, dependencies or strategic priorities.

While local optima can appear sensible within limited observation areas, the global optimum describes the best overall solution within all possible combinations. Particularly in the case of complex investment portfolios, this distinction is of central importance for the quality of decisions.

The discussion about how such decision spaces can be mathematically modeled and systematically analyzed is therefore gaining international relevance. This is where business practice, mathematical optimization and technological innovation meet directly.

Relevance for companies, consultants and decision-makers

The question of mathematically suboptimal investment portfolios affects not only individual companies, but also numerous organizations in industry, SMEs, infrastructure, the public sector and transformation management. Especially in times of high investment dynamics, tight budgets and multiple conflicting goals, the importance of structured decision-making models increases.

With his work as CEO of mAInthink and as a management consultant, Sascha Rissel brings this perspective to the international exchange. The focus is not only on theoretical issues, but above all on the practical relevance for real investment, portfolio and prioritization decisions.

International exchange in the WEF network

Being accepted as a CME member of the World Economic Forum network underlines the growing importance of decision quality, mathematical portfolio analysis and globally optimal allocation decisions. The exchange within such networks offers the opportunity to bring together new impulses from business, science and technology and to shed light on complex issues from different perspectives.

The question of why many investment portfolios remain mathematically suboptimal and how the global optimum can be calculated in complex decision-making situations is one of the topics that is becoming increasingly strategically important for companies and institutions worldwide.