“A shared purpose unites the players in an ecosystem at its core. It is the foundation for collaborative value creation and ensures effective alignment with our partners.”
ANNE FISCHER,
Head of Rail Infrastructure Products, Siemens Mobility GmbH
“Innovation is not something that happens when a single party develops ideas detached from its environment and without involving customers or partners. To develop true customer-centric services, for example, we constantly gather feedback from our customers and feed these insights into our innovation management process. We designed this process as a co-creation journey with parties from within LBBW, external partners, and customers.”
TIM KLOPSCH,
Head of Innovationsmanagement, LBBW Landesbank Baden-Württemberg
“Ecosystems comprise independent actors, each of which contributes certain building blocks to the whole solution. APIs function as a software-based enabler to promote such collaborations among independent corporations, while at the same time keeping complexity manageable. With suitable interfaces, complementary solutions from various industries, such as automotive, machinery and engineering, or banking can be combined more effectively and create additional value for customers.”
CHRISTOPH BERENTZEN,
Head of API Banking, Commerzbank AG
“The pharma industry has always relied on collaborations to address unmet healthcare challenges around the world. However, in order to navigate the digital transformation journey, we must think multilaterally. For instance, when treating chronic diseases, collaborations with technology ventures, providers, and payers can create solutions that improve outcomes by empowering people to live the life they want with better care. At Sanofi, we therefore aim to create innovative ecosystems centered around patients’ and health care practitioners’ needs.”
KATHERINE OSSENKOPP,
Head of Innovation Models, Sanofi General Medicines (Germany, Switzerland, and Austria)
“With R-Cycle we are building an ecosystem to enable circular economy for plastic packaging by sharing information amongst cross-industrial actors. The biggest challenge was and still is to find the right incentives for all involved actors along the life cycle, as each can autonomously participate and benefit in our open ecosystem.”
DR. BENEDIKT BRENKEN,
Director R-Cycle Initiative, Reifenhäuser Group
“We successfully built Geotab’s unique open platform for fleet management on the premise of creating valuable insights from the massive amount of data arising from all of our sensors across the globe. Seizing the additional potentials of our partner ecosystem allows us to reach a new level of knowledge, based solely on the exchange and analysis of data.”
KLAUS BÖCKERS,
Vice President Nordics, Central & Eastern Europe, Geotab
“Sustainability, an entrepreneurial mindset, and a humanity-centered approach to technology guide the educational ecosystem that we built with Tomorrow’s Education. Not only our university partners but also each mentor and partner firm must embrace these values in order to contribute to the growth of our ecosystem. We fully believe that with a strong value orientation, we not only provide guidance on which complementors and innovators we seek for our ecosystem but also we more clearly attract our customers to a common purpose: redesigning education to learn differently, grow limitlessly, and do work that matters.”
DR. THOMAS FUNKE,
Co-Founder, Tomorrow’s Education
“Digitalization should enable more efficient interorganizational collaboration than ever before. In practice, however, we almost invariably see a high realization hurdle with every information exchange due to different systems and interfaces. Only a joint technological infrastructure enables seamless collaboration in ecosystems.”
DR. CARSTEN SCHMIDT,
myOpenFactory Software GmbH
“Network effects are crucial drivers when leveraging ecosystems. At Scrambl., for example, we aim at connecting two market sides, young talents on the one hand and SME recruiters on the other hand. To get traction on the market, we try to trigger indirect network effects by collaborating with contributing market player on either side, for instance, job-posting platforms or university career centers. Consequently, we try to build up one side of the market first in order to make it more interesting for the other side. Once we reach a certain critical mass, direct and indirect network effects will eventually significantly accelerate our network growth.”
DR. MARC BURKHALTER,
Chief Executive Officer, Scrambl. AG
