Digital expert Christoph Bornschein, Co-founder and CEO of TLGG, on What it Takes to Make Digital Transformation Work

Egon Zehnder’s Brigitte Lammers sat down with Christoph Bornschein, cofounder and CEO of TLGG, a digital consultancy company with offices in Germany and in the United States. Bornschein is an author, an investor and a member of the digital advisory board for one of Germany's biggest banks. We wanted to find out what leaders need to know today to create a better world tomorrow.

Part 1: The Global Perspective

The United States and Europe take different approaches in tackling digital challenges. What are the differences you are seeing, and what’s next for these regions?

We see massive competition across those regions. Obviously, the head start region is the Silicon Valley-driven approach of building digital business models. They employ the notion of fail fast and those kind of poster-boyish quotes. But it's all about executing—really quickly—and less about ideation. The United States has really won the business to consumer (B2C) platform game. However, we can also see that the American digital decade is coming to a point where it's not clear what's going to be next.

This is an opportunity for Europe—to decide if they want to apply what they’ve learned from the United States in B2B contexts into logistics and supply chain management. It's really the moment where Europe decides if it will build B2B digital capabilities and digital business models, taking what has been learned in B2C platforms and adopting it to highly regulated and more complex markets.

What is your perspective on Asia? What are they doing well, and what can other regions learn from them?

I think the only right thing to do is to paraphrase Kai-Fu Lee in his book AI Superpowers. What we're seeing is that after the age of invention of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the like, we are now at the age of implementation. They are modeling, remodeling, tweaking business models, failing, restarting again, building 10 tools of the same kind with just slight tweaks that differ between those tools.

China in particular is impressive in the financial sector. They've got $1.4 trillion in accounts on mobile apps right now. Singapore's quite interesting if you look into smart buildings and smart cities. We see Vietnam and Thailand with their young demographics adapting to change way quicker than we do in Europe. Asia is going to be the global lab for everything that is new.

When we look at big companies, such as Alibaba or Baidu in China, how much will they impact the overall development of the country?

It comes down to values and where the society is going as a whole, and I think there's two possible ways. There is the controlled, dystopian way, where technology is going to be tools of control. Or it could be—and this is just as probable—the building blocks of prosperity for freedom and the ability for development.

In a utopian way, China could be one of the most digital countries on the planet, and the digital economy that will win in competition over all other economies. The crucial point is will they understand how to globalize their businesses?