How many times have we heard that before? If Europe wants to be amongst the winners in the global battle of the IT champions, it will also need a more developed understanding of entrepreneurship. Our continent boasts a fertile young IT scene that churns out a steady stream of creative innovations but that all too often fails to get its product ideas over the line into the growth phase. Small businesses frequently find themselves no longer able to afford the new investment they require because of the limited nature of Europe’s venture capital market. These beacons of hope are then often snapped up by established industry giants from overseas.
Reversing the brain drain
We need to reverse the associated brain drain instead of merely complaining incessantly about the situation. Only if European SMEs recognise the opportunities afforded by a tie-up with innovative small businesses will Europe be able to harness its IT expertise in all future-oriented sectors impacted by digitalisation and exploit it for market success.
The reasons why these two types of business should join forces are obvious: with the support of a young company, established companies from the IT industry can devise new business models and access new technologies, two essential criteria for keeping pace with the challenge of constant digitalisation. And, with an open mind, they can also instigate the necessary transformation in their corporate culture.
Next-level entrepreneurship
I call this pooling of strengths from two different business worlds “next-level entrepreneurship”. We at Fabasoft have developed gradually from an IT company for boundless records management into a provider of a cloud-based business process platform that enables us to cover digital business processes spanning an entire organisation with the aid of a unique set of features. These all-in-one solutions for today’s IT requirements stand out thanks to their automated workflow management, access protection, European-standard compliance and traceability, smart document editing, certified data security and maximum data protection, comprehensive interfaces with company-related applications and digital signatures, to name but a few of these features.
We were fortunate enough to develop a complementary mindset as a “business angel” while supporting our subsidiary “Mindbreeze”. With our investment in the Munich-based company Xpublisher, which has developed a product for fast, error-free and highly automated multi-channel publishing, we have already demonstrated how a new form of IT entrepreneurship can open doors to additional markets.
Fabasoft wants to spot the IT innovators
Through a joint initiative with the daily newspaper Die Presse, we intend to continue pursuing our strategy this year. We firmly believe that setting this strategic focus will not only enable us to strengthen our own market position in Europe but will also allow new, cost-effective digital solutions to be implemented for document-intensive processes in finance and insurance, healthcare, transport logistics companies or manufacturers.
We want our initiative to raise the public’s awareness of tie-ups between the IT industry and smaller creative companies in the information technologies sector. This is because I am more confident than ever that, in the future, success will belong to those entrepreneurs who are able to share their knowledge and abilities with others and thus lay the foundations for something new. This is nothing less than the new logic of our world of networks, in which companies and relationships need to be constantly reinvented. Especially in Europe.
