Digitization? I don't know it!

Everyone is talking about "digital transformation" and similar buzzwords. None of this is really new. After all, digitalization started many decades ago. The internet has also been around since the 1970s.

But we mainly see lip service and superficial concealment of the fact that it is high time - especially in Germany. What can we do?

Gunter Dueck, who has already spoken on this topic several times on the ReConf was the keynote speaker. In his iX article "Innovate if you must" he talks about this topic. As always written with a lot of humor, there is a lot of painful truth in it.

Where is the German digital economy?

Amazon and Google were ridiculed twenty years ago, but the smiles have now stopped. But there is still more talk than action. Autonomous vehicles are a good example of this. While German car manufacturers are still in the planning phase, Google has already covered millions of kilometers autonomously and launched an autonomous cab service that is currently being piloted to transport real customers.

One major problem is the reluctance to take risks. Instead of taking big risks - with potentially big profits - cost-cutting measures are taken and sales are mobilized. After all, this has always worked in the past.

What to do?

Gunter Dueck has many very concrete suggestions on how we can finally take action and get away from the cursed PowerPoint presentations. After all, there are successful, profitable German Internet companies that can serve as inspiration (Pixabay, MyHammer), and there is also no shortage of current topics that can be used to make money.

Of course, the watering can policy only helps to a limited extent. I always find it frightening when Subsidies provided and not drawn down. This points to deeper problems.

Meta-Activism

The problem with corporations in particular is that they want a big result. Just like in the pharmaceutical industry: a drug is only developed if it has a market potential of one billion dollars. But all ideas and products start small.

I can only agree with Gunter Dueck's view, and here I see a major structural problem in Germany: in order to have large, successful corporations, you need small corporations, and they used to be large companies and before that they were SMEs. But they haven't been supported in the way they need to be for a long time now.

Image source: re:publica (via Wikimedia)