Series #2 - B2B Platforms Platforms 4 Future A podcast dedicated to help business leaders to understand platforms Series #1 - B2B Platforms
Ecosystems at Scale with Platforms & Sustainability

Learn from B2B Platform Leaders

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

Your Hosts

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

Conversations with founders & executives of leading B2B platforms

Series 2 - Platforms 4 Future

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.

Conversations with founders & executives of leading B2B platforms

Series 1 - B2B Platforms & Ecosystems

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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