Like many other companies in the transport and travel industry, Germany’s flagship Lufthansa is fighting the COVID 19 pandemic and the imposed curfews and border closures. While the company was still in good shape at the beginning of the year, it has developed into a case of reorganisation in just a few months (through no fault of its own). The collapse in stock market valuations forced the DAX to replace Lufthansa with another company, and this is – Deutsche Wohnen, a real estate company.

Deutsche Wohnen is currently valued at €14.6 billion, while Lufthansa only managed €5.2 billion, half from the beginning of the year. Now Deutsche Wohnen can enjoy success, but still this swap leaves a stale feeling.

Inspirations from overseas

If we put this exchange in connection with other events of the past days, then the reason for the stale feeling becomes clear. For example, SpaceX was the first private company in the history of space travel to bring a rocket manned by astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken into space to the ISS space station. The first stage of the rocket landed safely on a landing platform floating in the Atlantic Ocean, as it had done dozens of times before.

Just four days later, SpaceX sent another rocket into space, launching dozens of satellites into orbit for the StarLink program.

Certainly inspired by the success of SpaceX, the share price of another Elon Musk company, Tesla, rose. And for the first time, Tesla’s stock market valuation exceeded that of all German car manufacturers combined. And this after Apple was already worth more than all 30 DAX companies together at the beginning of the year.

While Germany’s new DAX member is a residential companies – and with a certainly important business, no question – elsewhere technology and digital companies inspire people around the world. In a country that likes to stage itself as a technology leader and export world champion, the development of these technologies is lagging behind, even has problems accepting them, let alone adopting them.

Not only Germany is struggling with this, the whole of Europe is falling behind. Only very few digital companies and inspiring technology firms have emerged in Europe in recent decades. The fact that the majority of the newly founded European space companies sooner or later set up their tents in the USA is causing ESA managers headaches. Eighty percent of the companies listed on the DAX are older than 100 years.

What can we do?

I have reflected on this many times here, and one factor is that we encourage business start-ups and risk-taking, not only by simplifying processes, but also by changing public attitudes.

Perhaps the Corona crisis offers us the chance to seize and encourage many people to finally implement their own ideas and find comrades-in-arms. Three months of home quarantine with plenty of time to think about our own goals will hopefully bring us a wave of founders. There is also no lack of money in rich Europe, there is rather a lack of understanding for risk investments, which initially cannot be evaluated with traditional economic indicators.

And finally, we need an environment with customers who are not afraid to buy new, unproven technologies and work with the young companies to improve them. After all, risk aversion in saturated Europe runs through all levels.

The stimulus package of the German government itself is a first start. One goal would be to invest money from the aid package in young companies and encourage them to innovate. The fact that old technologies are no longer simply supported was demonstrated by the refusal to promote combustion vehicles.

And this could be the real legacy of the Corona crisis, that it gave us the chance to reinvent ourselves and bring innovation and inspiration to the world.

This article was also posted in German.