P4F #12 / SE2 with Matthias Naab & Marcus Trapp of Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering

How can we make the Mittelstand and the SMEs competitive in the
industry of platforms? Our new guests are coming from the largest
research organization in Europe - Fraunhofer Institute for
Experimental Software Engineering. The main task of the Fraunhofer
organization 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.” We are sure that you will be very
interested to hear more valuable advices from our guests! Tune in
and enjoy our thrilling Podcast about the latest possibilities in
the platform economy. Listen to the episode on your favorite
broadcast platform. #platforms4future