Prof. Dr. Ing. Dennis Kolberg, Ph. D.
Approaches in software startups to foster innovative products
Startups, despite operating under significant resource constraints, often surpass established enterprises in their ability to introduce disruptive innovations. This keynote addresses the distinct nature of product management within startup environments, contrasting it with practices in larger, more structured corporate settings. It reviews contemporary innovation methodologies as commonly applied in entrepreneurial ecosystems, and contrasts them with the relatively limited academic discourse and empirical research on the subject. The presentation also outlines preliminary findings from ongoing research, particularly the development of a startup-specific methodological framework and the evolving responsibilities of product managers in the era of AI-enabled products.
CV & Research Summary
Dennis Kolberg is a professor and head of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Business Development at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Lübeck (Germany). Before joining academia, he was Chief Product Manager at an IoT startup and responsible for one of the first IoT platforms that integrating digital twins. He also served as a CTO and co-founder of a startup dedicated to industrial master data management. Throughout his career, he consulted companies ranging from automotive and pharma to food industries on implementing the Industrial Internet of Things. In his doctoral thesis at SmartFactoryKL, Dennis Kolberg developed an approach to digitize lean production. Additionally, he was head of research in the Department of Innovative Factory Systems at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Kaiserslautern. His field of research covers digital software product management for B2B startups as well as methodologies and architectures for IIoT and Industry 4.0.