Christoph Burkhardt

6 radical technologies and how they are changing our lives, our work and our business models.

What we can and cannot learn about real innovation from California’s pioneers.

How breakthrough ideas become profitable innovations that turn entire industries upside down.

How to turn a Silicon Valley mindset into the engine of your innovation culture

This is what the lecture is about:
Silicon Valley is full of myths and they travel around the world. Many people believe in many of these myths, and it’s worth taking a closer look at what they’re really doing there. I’ve been there for so long, seven years now, and I’ve taken a close look at what many companies are really doing there and if you look behind the scenes, first of all, many things are not that different from Germany, from Europe. but there are things we can take away. And there are a few lessons that work. Everywhere. One of the most important things that Silicon Valley is doing everywhere, and what local innovators are trying to do, is to find a question that nobody is asking yet, to look for the gap that nobody sees yet. This is the mindset with which they go to work every day, always looking for the one question that no one has found yet, and the question quickly arises: What is actually a good question? A good question is one that I don’t yet have an answer to myself and that’s one thing we can definitely copy, finding a question everywhere that no one has an answer to yet means that no one else is likely to ask such a question and no one else will come up with the answers that everyone already has anyway. That’s called disruption, and that’s why Silicon Valley is disruptive. As one of the myths we need to debunk. It’s not geniuses who are driving innovation in Silicon Valley. It’s people asking new questions that they don’t yet have answers to. More on this.

Only those who behave like a robot will be replaced by one …

This is what the presentation is about:
We are facing a major challenge and it is driven by technology, above all artificial intelligence and everything we know about data usage. It’s changing things. And what we have experienced over the last 20 years or so is that the technologies we use are becoming more and more human. Above all, there is artificial intelligence. They behave like humans, they talk like us. They also look like us in many cases, they walk like us and suddenly they understand us too. We can talk to them because we have artificial intelligence. So robots have become more and more human and, on the other hand, humans have become more and more like robots and that’s a problem. Humans have standardized everything about their job. They have standardized their thinking, their way of working, their approaches to new problems. There are hardly any new ways of solving problems that people in companies have not yet tried. Because everything is so standardized, everything that can be standardized can also be automated and suddenly jobs disappear. Suddenly an infinite number of activities disappear. We have to figure out how to stop being robots, how to become what actually makes us human. To survive the next wave, we have to learn how to bring out the creative, visionary potential that is actually in every human being. Don’t be a robot.

How the next generation of smart technologies is changing companies, customers and all of us …

This is what the presentation is about:
Innovations can be used for very different things. And for me, one of the most important questions that every entrepreneur has to ask themselves if they want to drive innovation is, what are they there for in the first place? Why are we in the business we are in? What is the driver? What is our justification for our company to exist at all? Before we start using new technologies, using new innovations, using them somewhere, turning them into cases and making a lot of money, we need to ask what we exist for. What are we here for? What do we want to achieve? As long as we haven’t found a big question, we don’t know where to look for answers. Our task is to make the world a better place. I am firmly convinced that our task of being on this planet, fundamentally as human beings, is to leave the next generation a world that is better than the one we found. And technology can of course be used to achieve this. Innovations can of course be used for this. I have to start with the purpose question. I have to ask: Where? How do I justify the fact that I am pursuing innovation at all? Because I want to solve a big problem. The answer can’t be because I want to make money. We are working on big issues. We need clean food to survive. We need clean water and we need clean air. There is an incredible amount of technology that we will see in development over the next ten, twenty years, from artificial intelligence, data analytics, to robotics and plantations that are completely autonomous. We will see technologies in use that are trying to save our planet. And that can only go well if we start by asking ourselves what we actually want to achieve as entrepreneurs. And that is our responsibility to drive innovation that moves the world forward, that makes the world better, and not just pragmatically set up innovations that ensure that my business survives.

How organizations become a hub for innovation …

How ecosystems for innovation are continuously reinventing our lives …

How the most innovative companies are relying on trust to change the world …