What trends do you see in the IT sector? Where are the greatest opportunities and challenges at present?

A clear trend is not discer­ni­ble for me at the moment. The deve­lo­p­ment of the Inter­net does not only go in one direc­tion. Nevert­hel­ess, a lot is still happe­ning in the “mobile” area, espe­ci­ally with regard to the deve­lo­p­ment of new apps for mobile devices.

Enter­prise appli­ca­ti­ons and enter­tain­ment appli­ca­ti­ons also have great poten­tial. Online marke­ting and adver­ti­sing — espe­ci­ally in the mobile envi­ron­ment — are equally big topics. Howe­ver, we also see many young compa­nies here that offer solu­ti­ons based on a SaaS plat­form that draw important and usable insights for their custo­mers from large volu­mes of data — keyword “Big Data”. Content marke­ting is another area that is beco­ming incre­asingly important for compa­nies — here, in addi­tion to search engi­nes, social media chan­nels will have to be included more and more. And last but not least, there is the “Inter­net of Things”, in whose envi­ron­ment many new busi­ness ideas can be found.

Germany, and Berlin in parti­cu­lar, has deve­lo­ped into a promi­sing and strong start-up scene in the digi­tal sector. But if the busi­ness ideas lack real inno­va­tion, long-term concepts and scalable tech­no­lo­gies, they will have a hard time convin­cing inves­tors and survi­ving in the long term. 

The U.S. is certainly a step ahead of us in terms of exploi­ting the oppor­tu­ni­ties and poten­tial of the digi­tal economy. The size and homo­gen­eity of the U.S. market alone makes it signi­fi­cantly easier for a U.S. startup to go global right from the start. The barriers of a German or Euro­pean startup are obvious here. In addi­tion, there are larger finan­cing rounds in the U.S. market for young compa­nies, which can thus take off faster than their Euro­pean coun­ter­parts. Tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions also seem to be adopted more quickly by the Ameri­can popu­la­tion than they are here. And in the debate about ‘copy­cats’, US start­ups usually serve as models for the so-called German copies. Nevert­hel­ess, Ameri­can compa­nies and inves­tors also like to look at the Euro­pean market, and thus also at the German market, because inno­va­tive compa­nies can be acqui­red more chea­ply here.