Has innovation gone rancid ?: "Many startup centers have seen Waterloo"

Joachim Rotzinger can be described as a hopeful corporate leader. The managing director of the media company Haufe Group is convinced that we don't need a German offshoot of the billion dollar Silicon Valley in the USA. Why, he explains in "So techt Germany".

Just recently, Haufe made people sit up and take notice with the Corona study "We are after Corona". Four groups of companies have defined themselves: the powerful, the insecure, the hopeful and the resigned.

Joachim Rotzinger can easily be described as a hopeful corporate leader. In his opinion, there will be no return to the working world before Corona. In the long term, entire value chains will change, says the managing director of the Haufe Group. He refers to companies such as Heideldruck and Hans Grohe, who "are in the process of questioning themselves in their added value".

Joachim Rotzinger has been part of the Haufe Group management since 2010.

(Photo: Haufe Group)

This also applies to his company: "We'd rather cannibalize ourselves before someone else does," says Rotzinger, referring to one of the giants from Silicon Valley when in doubt. In his opinion, we don't need a German offshoot of the billion dollar US innovation and tech forge. We should take a good look at what is happening there and in Asia, but "we should also be self-confident enough to push our own thoughts forward", appeals Rotzinger.

The Haufe boss thinks nothing of startup centers that were founded years ago by a number of companies: "If you then look after a few years to see what sustainable innovation has come out, many have ultimately experienced a Waterloo," says Rotzinger.

From his point of view, it doesn't necessarily make sense to always keep everything separate. According to the motto: "Some of the employees earn the money as boring worker bees and the others are the cool guys who invent the future." All employees would have to be taken along: "There is so much passion in the people who run today's business, there are so many ideas and know-how," says Rotzinger with conviction and quotes a colleague who gave him years ago: " A product is innovative when a customer buys it. "

Why Joachim Rotzinger would like to spend a day with Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, he explains in the new episode of "So techt Germany".

You can find all episodes in the ntv app, Audio Now, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can use the RSS feed for all other podcast apps. Copy the feed url and simply add "So techt Germany" to your podcast subscriptions.

Do you have any questions or a great guest for Frauke Holzmeier and Andreas Laukat? Then please send an email to [email protected].

. (tagsToTranslate) Economy (t) Start-ups (t) Silicon Valley (t) Corona crisis