In conversation with Edzard Overbeek, CEO of HERE Technologies. From an interview held at ESMT Berlin’s Annual Forum 2018 on June 7, 2018.

ESMT Berlin was founded by 25 leading global companies and institutions. The international business school offers a full-time MBA, an executive MBA, a master's in management, as well as open enrollment and customized executive education programs. ESMT focuses on three main topics: leadership, innovation, and analytics. ESMT faculty publishes in top academic journals. Additionally, the business school provides an interdisciplinary platform for discourse between politics, business, and academia. The business school is based in Berlin, Germany, with Schloss Gracht as an additional location near Cologne and a branch office in Shanghai, China. ESMT is a private business school with the right to grant PhDs and is accredited by the German state, AACSB, AMBA, EQUIS, and FIBAA. www.esmt.org

TRANSCRIPT

My name is Edzard Overbeek. I am the chief executive officer of HERE Technologies, a digital mapping and location-based company.

If you think about the physical world that you walk through in any city, you now overlay a two-to-three dimensional digital map, indoor and outdoor, at centimeter precision. Every use case becomes different.

Maintenance of buildings, potholes in roads and maintenance of roads, optimization of ride sharing and ride hailing, measuring heat maps of people that are looking for transportation with the available transportation.

Location-based services and digital maps are, in our opinion, the foundation for every business use case that a city or a government is looking for.

We believe that everybody is, today, in to big data. Big data is really the oil of the 21st Century. It is no longer just to gather big data, it’s the insights that you derive from big data. How can I use those insights to optimize my processes? How can I create new products, new services? What’s working, what is not?

Using big data in analytics and making sure you don’t invest into areas that, in your modelling, already shows that it doesn’t make sense to do. Learn fast, fill fast, and really use data as an integral part of your strategy to optimize anything you do into your government, into your business, into you as an entrepreneur.

That’s what I think HERE stands for and that’s potentially what people could learn from my company.