P4F #13 / SE2 with Martin Peters, CEO of DropFriends

Applied Research and the chance for SMEs / Mittelstand companies to grow their business with platforms 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