Business Challenges for the 2020s

1. Think like a tech company or perish.
2. Big platforms are here to stay, get along with it. 
3. Prepare for Marketing 2 Machines.
4. Safeguard consumer data or have no consumer data.
5. Create genuinely sustainable solutions for truly transparent markets Concluding Thoughts.

The global COVID-19 pandemic, the human tragedy it caused and the economic downturn after the outbreak of the virus are probably top-of-mind for decision-makers nowadays. However, the maturing digitalization, accelerated by new technologies and innovations together with new regulations and global challenges like the ever more obvious climate change are also still posing enormous challenges for businesses in the 2020s.

Before the Coronavirus pandemic hit the world, we conducted a series of five talks with experts covering a broad range of fields including Cybersecurity, Data Science, Entrepreneurship and Marketing from the NIM’s network and discussed the business challenges they see emerging for the 2020s.

In this short report we like to share a summary of our key learnings from the talks. The challenges reported here include the need to act and think like a tech company, finding a productive way to deal with the omnipresent plat-forms of "Big Tech", preparing for new ways of "Marketing 2 Machines" instead of marketing to humans, finding secure ways to collect and store consumer data, and creating comprehensible sustainable solutions for truly transparent markets of the future