Karsten was the CEO of the BSH Home Appliances Group from 2013 to 2019 and the Group CEO of Giesecke & Devrient from 2005 to 2013. Before, he held a number of Senior Executive and General Management Positions at Philips Semiconductors (now NXP) and served as the chairman of the German government IT-Summit chapters for Health and Security between 2006 and 2013. Karsten also was a member of the High-Tech Innovation Advisory Board to the German government between 2009 and 2013.

Building on the power of systems thinking and the potentials of convergent exponential (technology) developments, Karsten supports the scaling of high-impact entrepreneurs, the impact transformation journey of large multinational corporates and the synergies resulting from the cooperation of both. His experiences in building and exploiting the strength of platform business models and the building of related ecosystems adds significant value to his engagements.

Next to his engagement with the Unreasonable Group, he is a mentor at Endeavor and Ashoka and he is a member of the World Economic Forums Expert Group on Accelerating Digital Transformation. Karsten is a member of the board of John Elkington's Volans and he advises futur/io on their programs on moonshots for Europe.

Karsten studied physics, mathematics and computer science in Hamburg, Germany, before he joined Philips Corporate Research to work on Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Neural Networks and Cognitive Sciences in the second half of the 1980s. He received his PhD in Computer Vision from Utrecht University in 1993.