Carsten studied Business Administration and Information Systems in Giessen, Germany (Diploma), until 1999. He was with Brokat Information Technologies in their financial systems department and coordinated a joint research project with the University of Giessen and Karlsruhe, respectively. He obtained his PhD for his work on applying engineering approaches for the design of electronic markets and services (Market/ Service Engineering) after three years at Karlsruhe University in 2004.

After one year as an Assistant Professor with the Institute for Information Management and Systems he became Head of the Research Division Information Process Engineering (IPE) at FZI Research Center for Information Technologies Karlsruhe. At FZI he coordinates four groups of researches closely working together in the fields of technical infrastructures (i.e. SOA), innovative technologies (i.e. semantic technologies) and business engineering (i.e. BPM and Incentive/ Service Engineering).

Carsten was involved in and/ or responsible for the application and management of a number of national and international research projects. He is author and/ or editor of three books as well as of a number of scientific research papers that have been published in national and international journals and conference proceedings. Since 2005 he is associate lecturer at the University Karlsruhe and gives a course on Innovative Business Models and Service Engineering.