In a nutshell

Vision 2025

In 2025, Hamburg@work and its DigitalCluster.Hamburg will be networking those businesses that provide the transformation for the focus clusters on a participatory basis, along digital value chains, to enable a cross-technology digital platform for users and suppliers in the business and administration context for the smart city Hamburg.

Shooting for the moon

In the big-thinking lingo of Silicon Valley, the “moonshot” is also known as an MTP – a massive transformative purpose. This highly aspirational tagline is the thing you get out of bed for every morning. An MTP represents not only what is possible in the extreme case from the present perspective, but the thing that we want to be different in the future.

“The network for a new world” is the tagline that Hamburg@work has chosen. We get up every morning with the aim of creating the network for a new world: digital, future-oriented, inspirational, and driven by a sense of being on a mission.

Mission statement

 Within the DIGITALCLUSTER.HAMBURG, Hamburg@work brings together EXPERTISE for the DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – and has been doing so for 20 years.The members willingly share that KNOWLEDGE with their own NETWORK and with COOPERATING CLUSTERS in a spirit of participation and in an open CULTURE OF INNOVATION.

Digital transformation involves the digitalization and automation of core processes, including changing the framework conditions for the economy, the state and society. The most important prerequisite is the readiness to accept essential changes. For a digital transformation to succeed, businesses, employees and management as well as social systems need to be toughened up.

20 years of Hamburg@work

With 20 years of experience in networking companies from the media, IT and telecommunications, Hamburg@work celebrated a landmark with its 20th Anniversary Future Summit in fall 2017 and at the same time gave the go-ahead for its very own transformation of the brand Hamburg@work:20 years down the road, the formerly vertical Hamburg-media.net is now the horizontal DigitalCluster.Hamburg.

Smart city model

Prof. Dr. Henning Völpel, Managing Director of HWWI Hamburgisches WeltWirtschaftsinstitut, expressed the model as follows at the first Future Summit of Hamburg@work: “The vision of a smart city is one where we have a fantastic city that is worth living in, where noise now barely exists – unless we actually want noise. Is emission-free. Champions participation. Offers rich opportunities for people. In other words inspires the city’s entire population, the city’s entire society, gives them access to better health care and better education. Urban mobility plays a role.”

”That is maybe a Utopian view of a smart city,” opines Prof. Völpel, “but probably a technologically feasible one.”

Hamburg@work is doing its part to realize the vision of Hamburg as a smart city.

Structure and participations

Since the association was established on 13 August 1997 as Förderkreis Multimedia e.V., Hamburg@work has evolved into a small business group. As early as 2001 a fully-owned subsidiary limited company was founded and has since handled the association’s project business. The association and limited company were renamed Hamburg@work in 2006.

With the establishment of Neptun Award GmbH in August 2015, the organization and staging of Hamburg@work’s successful Neptun Award was handed over to another subsidiary limited company in which the association Hamburg@work holds 37.2% of the shares.

In addition to the corporate-law participations the IT Executive Club of Hamburg@work was set up in 2015 as an association arm, followed by Hamburg@work’s Women’s Club in 2016. Further club divisions are taking shape.

From the start of the 2016 financial year, all operational tasks were transferred from the association to Hamburg@work GFM mbH, as were the association’s employees. As a membership organization, the association Hamburg@work (e.V.) is the “parent company”, while Hamburg@work GFM mbH provides all services for the members, fulfills the economic purpose and performs the operational tasks of Hamburg@work, and holds the participations in other companies.