Dr. Hubertus Porschen

Why organisations work with Hubertus Porschen

• He speaks to mid-market boards from inside the same world. As the elected federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer from 2015 to 2018, he represented Germany’s young Mittelstand owners directly to policymakers and to ASU/Die Familienunternehmer.
• He has built and run digital businesses, not just advised on them. App-Arena and iConsultants give him a working vocabulary for what actually breaks when a traditional company tries to digitise a business model.
• His book Digitaler Suizid frames digital inertia as an existential risk to German firms, an argument that lands with audiences who have heard the optimistic version too often.
• He works in German and English with equal credibility, which matters for groups whose senior leadership sits across DACH and the wider European market.

Biography highlights

• Federal Chairman, Die Jungen Unternehmer (BJU), 2015 to 2018, the young-entrepreneurs body within the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association.
• Doctorate in economics, University of Marburg, with a dissertation on the academic entrepreneur.
• Author of Digitaler Suizid, on the digitalisation gap in the German economy.
• Founder and operator of multiple digital ventures including App-Arena GmbH; partner at iConsultants GmbH.
• Lecturer at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne.
• Listed in Top 100 Speakers Excellence 2026 by Speakers Excellence.

Biography

The German Mittelstand is one of the most successful industrial structures in Europe. It is also one of the slowest to absorb new technology. That tension defines the working subject matter of Hubertus Porschen.

He spent three years, from 2015 to 2018, as federal chairman of Die Jungen Unternehmer, the young-entrepreneurs wing of the ASU/Die Familienunternehmer association. The role put him in regular contact with policymakers in Berlin and with several thousand owner-managers running mid-sized German firms. The work that followed, as a speaker and as a founder, builds directly on that constituency.

His operating experience is the second pillar. App-Arena, an online marketplace for social media applications, and iConsultants, a digital advisory practice, gave him direct exposure to the gap between digital strategy decks and the messy reality of changing how a 150-person company actually works. His book Digitaler Suizid develops the argument: German firms that treat digitisation as a marketing project rather than an operating one are quietly removing themselves from their own future.

Today his keynote work concentrates on artificial intelligence: specifically the question of how a board moves from “AI-interested” to “AI-ready” without paralysing the operating business in the process. He lectures at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and the University of Cologne, holds a doctorate from the University of Marburg, and is listed in Speakers Excellence’s Top 100 for 2026.

Key speaking topics

• Artificial intelligence in mid-market operations
• Digital transformation in family-owned and Mittelstand businesses
• Entrepreneurship and founder leadership
• Innovation and disruption in traditional industries
• Change management across generational workforces
• Digital business model design

Ideal for

• Boards and executive teams of family-owned and Mittelstand firms in DACH
• CEOs, COOs and digital leaders confronting an AI adoption gap
• Industry associations and chambers of commerce convening member firms
• Founder networks and entrepreneurship programmes in German-speaking markets

Audience outcomes

• A clearer sense of where their organisation sits on the line between AI-interested and AI-ready
• A working argument for why digital inertia is a strategic, not operational, risk
• Specific examples of how German mid-market companies have moved digital initiatives out of pilot
• Vocabulary to talk to a sceptical board about AI without leaning on vendor language