ON A MISSION BETWEEN DATA, TECH AND EDUCATION
The pace of technological progress increases exponentially nowadays and keeps changing our personal and professional lives constantly. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Extended Reality or Blockchain provide great potentials for disruptive innovations and as technologies have become an integrative part in all industries, technological progress impacts everyone on a daily basis.
While the need for specific hard skills changes fast in any technological environment, developing the right mindset as well as soft skills has become crucial for every person no matter what age, origin or profession.
Having worked on numerous projects centered around technological innovations for over ten years, I noticed people often lack these important skills which leads to big issues in change management processes and inhibited innovation power. That’s why I’m on a mission to close the gap between data, tech and education and to inspire people to not only keep up with but to drive technological innovations.
WHAT I DO (AND HOW IT ALL STARTED WITH A BOARD GAME)
Based in Berlin, I foster corporate partnerships, advance corporate education, and drive new business initiatives as the Head of Business Development at CODE University of Applied Sciences.
Holding a master’s degree in Business Psychology, I already had the chance to work with lots of well-known institutions and companies like APX, Axel Springer, Deutscher Bundestag, Die Verbraucher Initiative e.V., Volkswagen and many more. Furthermore, I co-founded FreeTech Academy where I built a strategic program for young tech talents to establish a new approach of interdisciplinary education between tech and journalism (full CV on LinkedIn).
I also gave plenty of lectures in the fields of Digital Media Management and Personal and Social Competency Development and frequently share my knowledge as a speaker at events like WeAreDevelopers World Congress, EMMA Conference or Axel Springer’s TechCon.
Building education frameworks to enhance the understanding as well as the ability to work with different technologies has always been my passion. And it all started with a board game I’ve developed for my bachelor thesis more than a decade ago where I dealt with the development of a theoretical competency framework for consumers to be able to cope with the potentials and risks of Big Data. I chose this topic because I noticed that Big Data had so many great potentials but most people around me very insecure about Big Data while lacking an understanding of its functionality and potentials.
It was important to me to not only build a theoretical framework pointing out what competencies consumers would have to develop but also to find a practical approach that enabled everyone to gain these competencies and to feel more secure about the technology.
That’s why I developed a board game that enabled people of all age groups to gain the competencies I had identified. While I saw countless people playing the game, it prove to me that a playful and practical approach to technologies is the best way is to support people lose insecurities towards technologies and gain a better understanding of its risks and potentials opening the gate for successful innovation processes.
REFERENCES
