Welcome to Platforms 4 Future – a podcast dedicated to help business leaders to build and scale profitable and sustainable platform businesses by design.
We are Nathalie and Matthias from the Platform Innovation Kit Team. We welcome you to our conversations with experts and founders to uncover what they learned about growing & scaling of B2B platforms, marketplaces and business ecosystems.
Enjoy & Get some useful insights
Nathalie Dumas-Lamborghini
CEO FlyingRhino
Top10 Woman in Digital Business
PIK Partner France
Matthias Walter
CEO fastbreak.one
Founder PIK
Serial Entrepreneur
Available on your favorite podcast stations
Step into the future with our latest episode featuring Martha Beckenfeld. We’re exploring the fascinating world of the Web3 metaverse and its impact on platforms.
One area where the Metaverse is already having a significant impact is in the platform economy. Platforms such as Amazon and eBay have disrupted and transformed industries, and now there are about 21 categories of platforms. The question is, how will the platform economy move and transform into the Web3 world?
Overall, this episode was a great reminder of the importance of staying curious, being purpose-driven, and thinking beyond just our own platforms. We hope you enjoy listening and take away some valuable insights for your own platform ventures.
The Caruso alliance was formed 25 years ago by the Tech Alliance, a company dedicated to cataloging data for spare parts. Drawing on their experience and success, the alliance decided to create a platform for accessing and harmonizing car data. The goal was to make it easier for customers to access and use the data they needed.
The Caruso alliance has achieved this goal by harmonizing the data and the technical way of accessing the data. For example, they have created a unified data catalog, making sure that the data items satisfy the use cases their customers have. In addition, they have harmonized the technical way of accessing the data, so that customers can consume the data in the way they need. This could be in the form of a full API, a streaming technology, or a webhook.
Forming alliances is an effective way to create and sustain a successful platform ecosystem. By understanding the technology, data, and business models behind these platforms, businesses can pool their resources, share their expertise, and leverage the strengths of each member to create an unbeatable platform. The Caruso alliance is a perfect example of the power of alliances and serves as a great model for businesses looking to create their own successful platform ecosystem.
DigiKoo is a platform that is revolutionizing the way we look at data and its potential to combat climate change. The CEO of DigiKoo, Martin Möller, is a passionate advocate for using data to promote sustainability and mitigate the effects of climate change. In this podcast episode, we will discuss how data platforms like DigiKoo can help ensure a successful climate transition.
DigiKoo GmbH provides such insights to its customers with its in-house developed software, DigiPAD. Users can use it to process data to create reliable reports detailing the current state and forecasts in such areas as electricity, transport and heating.
Data-Platforms like DigiKoo have the potential to play a critical role in ensuring a successful climate transition. By providing businesses with the tools and insights they need to reduce their carbon footprint.
The podcast with Martin Möller will be a great opportunity to learn more about how data platforms can promote sustainability and mitigate the effects of climate change.
Meero has grown into a successful global platform that connects professional photographers and videographers with clients looking for high quality visual content. The platform was founded in 2016 and has quickly grown to become the largest on-demand photography service provider in the world, with over 100,000 photographers and videographers in over 100 countries. Part of the success story is the investment into own AI driven image improvement capabilities and services.
Today, Meero’s ambitions go beyond being a service marketplace. The company’s goal is to become an AI-powered platform that revolutionizes the visual content industry.
Meero’s transition from a service marketplace to an AI platform is a first major pivot to the company’s ambition and vision. By leveraging its massive database, developing AI-powered features, integrating with other platforms, and investing in research and development, Meero is positioning itself as a leader in the visual content industry.
We can’t wait to see what the future holds for this innovative platform. Listen to the Podcast and get the latest insight.
Data safety and privacy is a crucial topic around the world. We need to have sovereign options on the market that will allow us as consumers and as citizens to make self determined and well informed decisions on who can do what with my data, for how long and to what avail, to what purpose. Usually data protection is governed by nations and their legal bodies. But in digital ecosystems the boundaries are blurring more and more and therefore we need flexible technical solutions to go hand-in-hand with the legal frameworks.
This problem has shaped the idea of GaiaX. It started to materialize through an interoperable, interconnected and scalable data infrastructure where you have cloud hosting and cloud computing and edge computing, which is all interoperable.
How is GaiaX bringing different data sovereignty policies together and building a united solution? Our guest Peter Kraemer, Head of GaiaX, is explaining in this Podcast Episode.
Nowadays, it is very crucial to address the challenges around impact on the planet and society. But how to implement it and engage everyone inside of your organization? The answer: Network Effects. In our latest episode of the PIK podcast we talked to Eric Mangin, CEO, and
Paul Thiroloix, CFO, from French platform NooS about that topic. The platform NooS helps organizations to activate and engage with their employees in three ways: raise the awareness, provide education and create caring culture, for example through donations or fundraising.
How? Typically, most of the companies that make donations to support social activities in their neighborhood, but they don’t track the impact that has been generated by the donation. Here Noos comes into the game. Tune in to learn more and understand how you can leverage network effects to increase awareness and engagement within your organization.
The story of DPP started 3 years ago. They went through a selection of partners, formed an alliance, listened to customers and onboarded a lot of plants. Transformation of a classical production company into a data driven platform is not an easy journey and therefore we have invited Marc Geckler, the Tech Lead and Dirk Voigt, the business lead from VolksWagen to share their success story.
Data is always the most valuable asset and sharing it can be complex even among different plants of the same company. DPP has initiated a three platform approach to create a powerful cloud and build the applications on top. This approach will help to remove the borders between plants and allow exchange of innovative ideas.
How did DPP go around network effects? “It all started like popcorn”. Do you want to hear more about building a cloud platform in the production industry? Listen to the episode on your favourite broadcast platform.
With dropfriends, everyone of us can become an independent parcel shop and make the delivery service much more comfortable and sustainable. How?
Our guest, Martin Peters, the CEO of Dropfriends is going to explain to us in the latest episode of the “Platform 4 Future” podcast. Tune in to learn more about the multi-sided benefits for stakeholders and our planet. E.g. how you can become a paid parcel shop in seconds via mobile app to boost your household budget or how retailers can welcome more customers to their stores. Dropfriends and it’s leadership team are taking sustainability really seriously.
How can we make the Mittelstand and the SMEs competitive in the industry of platforms? Our guests are coming from the largest research organization in Europe – Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. 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.
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.
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?
How to create interest from your target customers about your #marketplace? In this podcast episode we 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 favourite broadcast platform.
Why are corporations struggling leveraging Blockchain technologies to build new business models and what can they do better? 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 10 years of Blockchain adoption and where the market is heading too.
A great example of how #platforms can support circular economy : 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: waste management and the production of local and renewable energy, with a huge market opportunity as almost 4 million tons of food industry biowaste is produced each year in France.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Denis Tishler, Chief Marketing Officer at wind-turbine, unveils how the company went from a usual marketplace with no industry expertise, to being leaders of a niche ecosystem. Today they are the world’s leading B2B platform in the wind industry, with 25K users a month in over 200 countries.
Together with Alessandro Pistillo, Head of Digital Strategic Projects, we explore how such a traditional company can use it’s footprint in the market to lay the foundation for a more sustainable collaboration among all the players in the ecosystem.
In our current podcast episode, we look at an aspect that doesn’t come up so often in our conversations: the closing of a B2B platform. For this, we caught up with Henrik Hahn from Evonik Industries. In his role, he initiated the development of a marketplace in 2017 – an absolute novelty in the very traditional chemical industry. 3 years later, however, the platform is already history. Why Evonik abandoned the idea, what hurdles Henrik had to deal with, and what he nevertheless learned from this journey into the startup world – that’s what he talks about rather frankly with Natalie and Matthias.
In our latest Episode we were very pleased to welcome Thilo Kassen, Executive Manager of PRISMA Capacity, the leading gas capacity platform in Europe. Together with Thilo we discussed the interesting shareholder model behind the company and how sustainability and climate change affect the future gas market in the long run.
Platforms are an important topic for each company strategy. But we see in our projects a big knowledge gap on executive / leader level but also on team level. Companies think they can build platforms just like they built products. There was a study from BITKOM in 2019 showing this gap -> only 5% of Executives understand this topic and have the skills to lead those initiatives. We want to explore what kind of roles and skills are required to build & scale a platform. How to educate future platform leaders & teams?
Evangelos Avramakis is a recognised thought leader and advisor in the field of insurance industry. At the Swiss Re institute he works with focus on digital and consumer related topics as the Head of Digital Ecosystems R&D. Within his position, he analyses the mid- and long term developments of emerging technologies and business models. Covering both digitization and business developments Evangelos has also huge knowledge and insights about the evolution of platforms and ecosystems which we are very pleased to learn more about.
Julian Kawohl is a Professor for Strategic Management at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin. He is also the founder of the Ecosystemizer framework, a methodology – similar to the Platform Innovation Kit – which helps managers intuitively understand ecosystems, set up ecosystem strategies and position themselves in such ecosystems.
Started in 2018, Evan GmbH is a german tech-start up operating the Evan Network as an enterprise blockchain infrastructure focused on manufacturing companies. With this blockchain technology, Evan provides a base for building trust in digital partner networks as well as enabling corporate solutions for the economy of things. Thomas Müller, CEO and co-founder of Evan, has spent a long time in the area of digital business and brings a lot of experience in blockchain technologies. That’s why we are very pleased to discuss with him the possibilities of decentralized infrastructure for different business and industry scenarios.
Markus Schorn is a member of the Deutsche Telekom Think Tank with focus on emerging technologies, innovations and business models. Within this role, he asked himself how technologies will impact our future lives and society. His book “10x DNA – Das Mindset der Zukunft”, which he wrote together with Frank Thelen, also revolves around this topic. It’s focusing on the acceleration of the technological process and the upcoming changes but also kind of a “wake-up call” to make sure that we keep up with all the possibilities and novelties which come along with new technologies.
Today, instrafreight is one of the leading platforms for B2B logistics in the european market. With focus on overland freight, instafreight matches the emerging transportation needs of shippers with the transport capacity of the carriers. Started in 2016 they faced an exciting journey from their first MVP to today’s platform with about 2000 shippers on the demand side and 25.000 carrier companies on the supply side. In our conversation with Philipp Ortwein, CEO and Co-Founder, he gave us a lot of insights about the impact of a digital platform approach on a market which is vastly fragmented.
In our conversation with Adrien Nussenbaum, Co-Founder and U.S. CEO of Mirakl, he gave us lots of insights and key success factors regarding the 3 lifestages of a platform, how to set up a platform initiative as an incumbent company and how platforms can create a more sustainable business.
In our newest episode, we talked to Chritian Warneck – VP of Amadeus, the platform to connect the travel ecosystem about the challenges of market entry and intermediation when it comes to building a platform for the travel business. Additionally, we learned a lot about the role of data and AI for todays and the future industry and why it is extremely important to keep innovating as a platform leader.
In our newest episode we talked to Christian Neumann, Managing Director of Tapio, the open ecosystem for the wood industry, about his most important learnings and keys to success when it comes to building an Win-Win-Win ecosystem. Tune-in to learn more why technology is not a key success factor, how to set up the right governance structures and how to enforce sustainability by collaboration and co-creation.
In this conversation we explored together with Simon Tüchelmann, CEO of kreatize, how to platformize manufacturing due to unbundling of production & supply chain capacities. Kreatize is a leading platform and known as the AWS for manufacturing. But not only that it helps companies to build resilient supply chains, it also is a big driver for a more sustainable future. A fantastic conversation and great source of insights for every B2B platform builder.
In our latest conversation with Josef Brunner, CEO of leading IoT platform relayr, we talked about key success factors for building a platform business. And he was clear right from the beginning that it is not about technology, it’s about focusing on outcomes for the customers and to understand market transformations. Only when you understand bigger trends and market shifts you can build a platform business to be ready at the right time at the right market.
Through a conversation with Sebastian Brenner, CEO of CheMondis, we explored how an incumbent company like Lanxess executed a platform strategy and launched the leading B2B platform in the chemical industry.
How to leverage communities to unlock network effects. Through a conversation with Adam Broadway, CEO and co.founder of platformOS, a leading innovation platform, we explore the role and impact of communities on growth and network effects.
testXChange is Europes leading marketplace for industrial testings and helps product companies to find providers for testing, inspection and certification services – revolutionizing the testing industry. There are about 50.000 laboratories in Europe – about 7.000 of them are on the platforms. Today we will talk about a special theme “Marketplace enabled SaaS” – so how a marketplace can be a complementary value proposition for SaaS.
Mercateo is Europe’s largest B2B platform; in this open discussion with Managing Director Lars Schade, we explored how the company unlocks network effects and leverages them to build defensibility against Amazon. Lars also shared with us how he leverages data and product information to give customers the possibility of more sustainable product purchases.
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