Business Academy Upper Austrian News

Allegedly, Europe has missed the boat in digitalisation. Today, the digital world is dominated by Amazon, Google, Facebook & Co. These companies seem invincible to us - just like Nokia, Kodak or MySpace back then. I call this the "illusion of the factual". Yet Google has no future at all.

Conference

The Business Academy of the OÖN

The OÖNachrichten Business Academy has been bringing top national and international speakers on current topics to Linz for years. On 28 June 2021, I was also able to convey exciting impulses to the participants with my lecture "Bullshit 4.0 - or the rediscovery of entrepreneurship".

Industrialisation was yesterday

Bigger, better, faster - these are fading ideals of industrialisation. During the industrial revolution, creativity was cast in steel. In the digital revolution, creativity is cast in algorithms. Digitalisation is the transformation of all technology into information technology. Of course, one can try to talk down this change. You can say it is merely a fourth industrial revolution. You can give the demon a familiar name to reassure yourself. But that will not tame it. Calling digitalisation Industry 4.0 is bullshit 4.0 at best, so the digital revolution is not a fourth industrial revolution, but its end.

The future of work

Our grandparents had to do inhuman work in factories. Why? Because robots hadn't been invented yet. The bad news here: We will still have to work in the future. Work never runs out. If a task disappears due to digitalisation, it wasn't meant for humans in the first place. Humanity will always be what remains - after everything inhuman has been digitised. Will work change? Sure. It always has been. Boring routine work is disappearing. Artificial intelligence transforms a company's experience into efficient processes so that employees can focus on what's important: Customer relations and innovation. We will take more responsibility for our own work. That means more autonomy - in the literal sense. Digitalisation brings more personal responsibility.

Small agile companies are getting stronger

Large corporations were yesterday. These emerged in the 19th century because there was no digitalisation back then. For the first time since 2001, the size of companies is decreasing. It is true that absolute employment has increased, as has the number of companies. But the number of employees per company has fallen. On average, companies are becoming smaller and smaller. The digital future belongs to the small agile companies that act sympathetically directly at the customer - online and offline. Prosperity does not come by itself - it has to be generated - by entrepreneurs. The digital future is open. There is only one thing I am sure of: it will be a good future for entrepreneurial people.

Click here for the TV report.

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