Track description

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become an increasingly important driver for new and often groundbreaking innovations. Digital innovations are changing products, services and entire business models.

Various technological developments such as the Internet of Things (IoT) or artificial intelligence (AI) have the potential to change the way value is created in the long term. These developments affect all sectors, as they are no longer limited to IT-related industries, but now also affect traditional product and service sectors in both the business-to-business and business-to-consumer sectors.

For example, the mechanical engineering company Bosch is becoming a platform provider by introducing a digital platform called "Bosch IoT Suite". On this platform, Bosch, its customers and partners can build a wide range of IoT solutions that connect more than 10 million sensors, devices and machines. Other platform operators such as Apple (mobile apps), Steam (online games) or Mozilla (browsers) consciously open up their ecosystems and allow external third party companies to add features (e.g. apps, games, add-ons or campaigns) to the core product of the platform, thus offering entrepreneurs and innovative ideas unprecedented access to a global market.

Netflix, originally a video rental company that mailed its films, is now only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring entrepreneurship and digital innovations driven by artificial intelligence. Netflix is not only optimizing its recommendation systems by using AI. Instead, teams use machine learning for multiple phases of value creation:

● During pre-production to improve location scouting (i.e., help decide where and when to shoot a film set),

● In post production to predict when manual review is most beneficial,

● And in delivering content to its customers to predict bandwidth usage, which helps Netflix decide when to cache regional servers for faster load times during peak demand periods.

With new and emerging ecosystems and new technological opportunities, traditional companies must regularly reassess and possibly adapt their business models or build new lines of business to survive. Corporate entrepreneurship and the opportunity to foster digital innovation within traditional companies is receiving increasing attention. At the same time, digital innovations also offer the opportunity to develop new solutions as a basis for new businesses and to challenge existing companies and business standards. For example, the Otto Group founded the Otto Group Digital Solutions with the aim of identifying, building and establishing new and attractive business models in the field of retail-related services.