Cornelius Boersch & Thomas Middelhoff – FUTURE missed?
Why Germany has missed out on digitization and how the crisis is helping us to catch up after all.
The Corona crisis has shown that Germany can suddenly go digital: home office, e-learning, video conferencing, virtual concerts. And that is only the tip of the iceberg of opportunities and possibilities offered by digitization.
But isn’t this thrust coming much too late? Cornelius Boersch & Thomas Middelhoff, both pioneers in the tech scene, shake us awake in their cutting-edge book: Germany has lost its international edge when it comes to digitization. In recent years, politics and the business elite have missed out on global developments.
But the authors also develop a great vision: Despite all our failures, we can still succeed in making Germany the world’s leading digital knowledge nation by 2030 – if we finally set the right course.
Cornelius Boersch & Thomas Middelhoff – FUTURE missed?
Thomas Middelhoff, born in Düsseldorf in 1953, was responsible for the group’s Internet strategy from 1994 as Bertelsmann AG’s Chief Strategy Officer and later became Chairman of the Bertelsmann AG Executive Board. At the time of his departure, Bertelsmann was one of the world’s leading media companies in the digital world with Internet activities such as AOL, Lycos, the “Bertelsmann e-Commerce Group” and Napster. He was a board member of AOL and in this function accompanied the acquisition of Time Warner. He was also a Board Member of Vivendi when Seagram was acquired and, as a Board Member of the New York Times until 2014, oversaw the successful digitization of the world’s leading newspaper.
Cornelius Boersch, born 1968 in Hanover, Germany, is an entrepreneur and founder of ACG and numerous other technology companies. The “Entrepreneur of the Year 2000” and “European Business Angel of the Year 2009” has been investing in digital start-ups worldwide for more than 25 years and, with over 350 investments, is today considered one of the most successful investors in the world of technology and startups. Cornelius Boersch is founder of the global investment companies Mountain Partners (2005) and Conny & Co. (2019) and was a close advisor to Guido Westerwelle between 2005 and 2012.