Taking a break to reflect, travel, enjoy life and keep an eye out for new impulses

Shoptalk is the world's largest community of retail changemakers with premier retail events in the US and Europe. I am grateful to have been a part of the advisory board, giving me the opportunity to discuss and explore the latest trends and developments in retail with impressive retail leaders and personalities.

brigk is supporting (potential) founders in the region of Ingolstadt to create companies helping to shape the digital future of the world in place. It was a pleasure for me to help shape part of their journey as a member of the Supervisory Board.

Bitkom is Germany’s digital association advocating for the the digitisation of the economy, society and public administration. The retail commitee aims to anticipate and evaluate new technological trends, exchange views on jointly identified challenges along the digital supply chain and jointly drive forward digitization at the point of sale and via omni-channel strategies in order to improve the acceptance of digital technologies.

N3XT is the corporate innivation unit of MediaMarktsaturn with the focus on identifying, testing and scaling relevant retail (tech) innovations. I designed, established and led this corporate innovation unit as well as launched the open innovation platform Retailtech Hub together with Plug and Play (now Plug and Play Retail Germany). With N3XT I built and led a high-performing and awarded team with research, project management, UX design and business development resources which shaped the corporate innovation strategy and has been best practive within retail.

Heading the Digital Transformation & Projects department I led the project team to transfer topics from research into actual innovation test projects and launched transformation initiatives to open up corporate culture for digitization and innovation.

With the appointment of the first CDO, the Digital Strategy & Transformation unit was created, which I co-defined and -established. This newly defined business area had the purpose to test and understand new technologies as early as possible to avoid ignorance of major relevant (digitization) changes in the tech and business world. As part of my role, I initiated the "Digital Campus" employee event to create awareness and transparency about the relevance and importance of digitization. I was also responsible for the first innovation projects, such as an AR project with Google Glass on "shopping in the future".

Similar to a classic (external) consulting role, I have defined, set up and been responsible for large strategic business improvement and development initiatives, such as a joint venture assessment, a business transformation program or the growth strategy for an e-commerce subsidiary.

At IBM, I was fortunate to be responsible for and support projects in a wide variety of industries and disciplines, amongst others an eCommerce shop launch, the development of an international marketing portal, (Lean Six Sigma) process optimizations as well as a strategic core competence assessment and forecasting.Being selected for the IBM Corporate Service Corps I had the opportunity to be part of an international project team supporting non-governmental organizations in Tanzania. In my case, TERNET, the network for Tanzanian higher education and research institutions, in revising their strategy.

SynerTrade is a leading global provider of eProcurement software solutions. Working at a rather young company back then I was able to get insights in all dimensions of a software company but especially into customer service, software rollout and customization as well as software sales.

At Quelle AG, one of the former large universal mail order companies, I got to know different areas of a retailer and large corporation in 3-month assignments during my dual study program. I was able to get a taste of marketing, HR, sustainability, and even the management and day-to-day operations of a smaller subsidiary abroad.

Besides being lucky to explore the Caribbeans on a weekly basis, I acquired the basics of a service provider mindset.