Welcome 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.
Series #2
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In this episode of “Platforms 4 Future,” we dive into the world of IoT platforms, specifically focusing on industrial applications. Join us as we explore the challenges and possibilities of implementing these technologies in a conservative industry. Our guest shares their experiences and insights, discussing the importance of trust, reliability, and building a successful platform in the IoT ecosystem. Don’t miss out on this informative and thought-provoking discussion. Tune in now!
This episode of the “Platforms for Future” podcast is about B2B pricing and monetization. This is one of the most crucial topics and every platform needs to crack it. Monetize one side, two sides, pricing differently, commission fee, subscription fee, and so on. There are a lot of options, but which one is the best choice?
Our guest, Jens Weghake from D.VELOP, a German B2B platform provider, shares his knowledge and experience on this topic. Jens joined the platform team some years ago after he finished his Phd on Pricing models. His job was to understand and implement the right pricing for d.velop – and this journey brought him a lot of insights – not only from a financial point of view, but also legally. Together with our host Matthias Walter, they discuss the special requirements that exist especially in the B2B area and how to successfully meet them.
In this “Platforms for Future” episode, Martha Beckenfeld discusses the impact of the Web3 metaverse on platform economies. The focus is on how platforms like Amazon and eBay are adapting to Web3, with three key insights:
This episode emphasizes staying curious and purpose-driven in the evolving platform landscape. It’s a valuable resource for anyone interested in the future of platform-based businesses.
The Caruso alliance, formed 25 years ago by the Tech Alliance, aimed to simplify access to car data by creating a unified platform. They achieved this by harmonizing both the data and the technical methods of accessing it, such as through APIs, streaming technology, or webhooks, tailored to meet customer use cases.
This success is attributed to the collaborative effort of the alliance members, who pooled resources, shared expertise, and leveraged each member’s strengths, forming a sustainable platform ecosystem.
The Caruso alliance exemplifies the effectiveness of alliances in building successful platform ecosystems, showcasing a model for businesses seeking similar achievements. The related podcast offers more insights into this successful alliance and its strategies.
Meero, founded in 2016, has rapidly grown into the world’s largest on-demand photography service with over 100,000 professionals in more than 100 countries.
Originally a global platform connecting photographers and videographers with clients, Meero is now pivoting towards becoming an AI-powered platform in the visual content industry.
CEO Gaétan Rougevin-Baville outlines this transition, emphasizing building a massive image database for AI training, developing AI-powered features, integrating these innovations into Meero’s platform, and expanding services to other networks. A key goal is to automate the entire visual content creation process, from shooting to distribution, using AI. This shift signifies Meero’s ambition to revolutionize visual content creation and consumption, marking a significant strategic change in the company’s direction.
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.
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. So you can select whichever service suits you most amongst a variety of service offerings on the market.
How is GaiaX bringing different data sovereignty policies together and building a united solution? Our guest Peter Kraemer, Head of GaiaX, is explaining in our new Podcast Episode. Jump in and get the latest insight about your personal data security.
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”.
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.
As a special gift for our loyal listeners use the Code: PODCASTLOVE
For free DropPoint bookings and make it a more sustainable xmas. *Code is valid until 31.03.2022 for free DropPoint bookings. To find out more, please visit Drop Friends ( https://www.dropfriends.com)
How can we make the Mittelstand and the SMEs competitive in the industry of platforms? Our new guests are coming from the largest research organisation in Europe – Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. The main task of the Fraunhofer organisation is to keep the German and European industry competitive or make them competitive. 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. Their advice to SMEs is the following: “In order to achieve great things in the area you are currently working in, sometimes you need to look around and maybe have a look at the completely different business domain with the skill set that your company and your employees already have.”
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.”
How to create interest from your target customers about your marketplace? In this podcast episode of Platforms4Future, Nathalie Dumas and Matthias Walter 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.
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-Systems, has revealed a great history about how machine building companies have joined their forces to create a software solution.
Denis Tischler, 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.
Series #1
In our newest episode, we talked to Christian 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.
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.
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