How can we make the Mittelstand and the SMEs competitive in the industry of platforms?
Our new guests are coming from the largest research organization in Europe - Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering.
The main task of the Fraunhofer organization is to keep the German and European industry competitive or make them competitive.
Common thinking is that platform and ecosystem economy is for digital giants or startups, but our guests Marcus Trapp and Matthias Naab together with us disagree with this statement. SMEs have a lot of assets to leverage and therefore platform and ecosystem economy should be a “sweet spot” in their development path.

The main problem lies within current thinking that building a platform requires a full transformation of the business model. But this is not true. A better way is a portfolio perspective where multiple business models should co-exists and a large portion is dedicated to transactional revenues.

Marcus and Matthias have given a very broad overview of the industry, its struggles and opportunities. Their advice to SMEs is the following: “In order to achieve great things in the area you are currently working in, sometimes you need to look around and maybe have a look at the completely different business domain with the skill set that your company and your employees already have.”

We are sure that you will be very interested to hear more valuable advices from our guests!
Tune in and enjoy our thrilling Podcast about the latest possibilities in the platform economy.

Listen to the episode on your favorite broadcast platform. #platforms4future

Web 3, Blockchain, Crypto, Decentralized Finance are currently the most discussed topics in the business world. To get some more understanding we have invited as guest of this Episode a specialist in this field - Tilmar Wilhelm Goos, Swiss based international tax and business specialist, speaker at conferences and universities an author of the book “Banking Bitcoins Taxation — The handbook of international money management and digital assets”.

Nowadays, in Web 2, everything is client oriented, banking does the job for you. With a shift to Web 3 and decentralized finances, means a transfer of responsibility to the individual or company itself. Decentralized Finance provides the infrastructure to participate and act on your own. But there is still a big gap between generations that has to be filled in.

Tilmar has shared with us his leadership advice: “Get involved. Play around within the technology, get a feeling of how this all works. Don’t trust, verify.”

Do you want to hear more about the future of the financial sector and its transformation?

Listen to the episode on your favorite broadcast platform. #platforms4future

How to create interest from your target customers about your #marketplace?

In this #podcast episode of #PlatformsForFuture, @Nathalie Dumas and @Matthias Walter interviewed @Friedrich Fries-Henrich, founder of @Circulania, a B2B platform for secondary raw materials, enabling companies to sell their industrial waste material as new products.
When they started, Friedrich and his associate thought it would be easy to replicate an eBay for steel materials but they underestimated that the B2B market is a very different market. Now Circulania helps companies to have a place where they can trust the information and where they can match the quality, price and availability of the products they are looking for.

In this episode we talk about :

- Companies’ expressed and unexpressed needs
- Creating a virtual value chain
- Matching quality, price and availability

Listen to the episode on your favorite broadcast platform. #platforms4future

There are a lot of corporates exploring Blockchain and DLT technologies to enable new collaborative business models - but only a few are successful.

In our conversation with Prof. Philipp Sandner from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, he reveals the latest trends of development of Blockchain in the B2B sector. Philipp is one of the leading heads in Germany when it comes to Blockchain, recognized speaker and advisor.

As we see the rise of demand for NFT, Metaverse etc. it is important to understand the trends and learnings from the last 10years of Blockchain adoption and where the market is heading too.

Tune in and enjoy our thrilling Podcast about the latest World trends.

The complete episode can be listened on your favorite podcast provider. #platforms4future

A great example of how #platforms can support #circulareconomy : Organix by Suez is a #marketplace which connects producers of organic waste (farmers, food industry manufacturers, ports, municipalities…) with biogas plants, which transform them into energy.
They combine two challenges: #wastemanagement and the production of local and #renewableenergy, with a huge market opportunity as almost 4 million tons of food industry biowaste is produced each year in France.

In this episode, we interviewed Leo Michellier, Digital Product Owner and Paul Beguerie, Project Manager. They will tell you more about what Organix does, how they went against the cliché of being all digital by adding a human layer to improve the customer journey and why they are unique.

The complete episode can be listened on your favorite podcast provider. #platforms4future

Pexcite is a future-oriented ecosystem for intertwined software solutions alongside the entire value chain of pharmaceutical products – from raw material to the end customer. Our guest Kathrin Günther, the Vice President of Business Unit Digital Solutions in Uhlmann Pac-Systeme, has revealed a great history about how machine building companies have joined their forces to create a software solution.

The most challenging part of Pexcite journey was to build up an awareness and sense that the world is changing also for a machine building companies, as Uhlmann Pac-Systeme. Despite “a luxury situation to start” there is still a long way to go and compete with a price pressure, other companies and to bring in a new understanding and mindset of digital business.
Tune in to hear this amazing story and learn how to approach management to enter the new era of digitalisation.

The complete episode can be listened on your favorite podcast provider. #platforms4future

Fashion Cloud is a B2B platform, helping fashion brands and retail stores to work together through data sharing. In this episode, you will learn about:

How they pivoted from a B2C application project into a B2B platforms used by the biggest German brands, How they manage to scale based on trust and company culture,
The crazyness of their recruitment process.

The complete episode can be listened on your favorite podcast provider. #platforms4future

Scaling corporate start-up? Where to begin? Frank Mattes, experienced expert in corporate business building brought the major input to this topic in 2018 together with other 20 clients. The first book was called “Scaling Up Corporate Startups”, it focuses on one question: How can large companies generate business impact from non-incremental innovation?

The complete episode can be listened on your favorite podcast provider. #platforms4future

Do your stakeholders think that your business is legitimate?

We often ask ourselves whether we are legitimate enough but we barely ask the same question at the company level. Eldorado, a french platform facilitating the connection between entrepreneurs and investors, managed to raise faster than other similar platforms by using growth hacking and legitimization methods. In just three years, they built a brand to look like a 10 years old expertise brand.

In this episode, we give you a few tips from their secret sauce.

#platforms4future

The latest emerging trends in the market of platforms is a creation of a platform by multiple companies together and data platforms, therefore for today's conversation we have invited two researchers: Katharina Hölzle a professor for Technology Management and Human Factors at the University of Stuttgart, leading the institute for human factors and technology management (IAT) as well as the Fraunhofer IAO and Marc Brechtel - Project Manager for Advanced Product Development in Freudenberg Filtration Technologies.

To conclude, there is a huge potential in collaborative platform building, as well as downside and in order to achieve and be ready for the future changes, there are still many uncertainties that we need to centralize.

#platforms4future