Dr. Michael Durst - Interview with Bayern Innovativ

Bavaria as a leading innovation location! This is the vision of Bayern Innovativ. The in-house digital innovation platform (powered by ITONICS) has brought this goal one step closer. Dr. Michael Durst, founder of ITONICS, will answer questions from Dr. Kord Pannkoke about digitization, innovation, and cooperation with Bayern Innovativ at the opening of the new innovation center in Nuremberg.

Mr. Durst, the name of your company is ITONICS. How did you come to this name and what stands behind it?

That's easy to explain. I stands for Innovation, T stands for Technology, O stands for Organization, N stands for Networking, the second I stands for Information Technology, C stands for Collaboration, and S for Strategy. That is, of course, complete nonsense. We founded the company in Nuremberg in 2009, sat in the red bar, and had everything together except a name and a business model. We have now found the business model after many years. We have noticed that everyone likes to drink Gin Tonic as their favorite drink and have tried to create a company name from "Gin Tonic," which you can explain later. That's how it happened.

In your opinion, where does Germany stand when it comes to digitalization?

And where exactly does your work start?

What we offer at ITONICS is a software solution to enable companies to bring their complete innovation management on one platform. This means: What trends will play a role in the future? Which technologies? How are these evaluated? How do they relate to each other? Which technologies enable new business models? Which trends are induced by customer needs that have changed in recent years or that will change? We network all this on one platform. We enable companies to create digitalization roadmaps, to operate trend and technology management on a single platform, and to view the whole thing in an integrated way, even across companies. The project with Bayern Innovativ, for example, in which we try to create a space with the digital innovation platform in which SMEs from Bavaria can also cooperate with each other on certain topics. In recent years, we have seen more and more that companies can almost no longer innovate on their own. I always need a key technology that I cannot master completely. Maybe I need a patent that someone else has. Or I first need to know who has this patent. Who masters this technology? We try to bring that together on one platform and create the possibility for companies to work much better together and plan much better. That's the contribution we're trying to make.

What are the concrete advantages for you if you work with Bayern Innovativ?

We currently work almost exclusively with large companies. We have a lot of customers from the automotive sector such as BMW and Audi, but also from the high-tech sector such as Cisco or INTEL. SMEs, in particular, would need these methods, which are hidden in the software, the framework, and also the possibilities of networking and cooperation. The problem is that we do not have market access. Bayern Innovativ is, of course, very networked and has this enabler role in the Bavarian business network. You also bring science and research together with companies. As a startup, we don't have access to this. The second is the question of costs. Of course, we are also interested in sales and EBIT. SMEs often say: "Before I use software that supports me in this, I prefer to do it in Excel and PowerPoint. That works quite well." I believe that Bayern Innovativ can be a super enabler here to make such highly developed methods and software solutions available to SMEs so that they can work with the same tools as large corporations. This is a very, very important asset.

One final question: How do you personally keep up with innovation and digitization?