04.12.2025 | Osnabrück
The Future Emerges at the Interfaces

Let us talk about solutions and sharpen the subjunctive. That was the appeal set for the day by Seedhouse Managing Director Florian Stöhr and Olaf Deininger at the opening of the innovate! Future Dialogue.

“The black swan has long since ceased to be just black – and we are now experiencing several black swans at the same time,” explained Christian Janßen from the management consultancy EY in his keynote. Companies must become strategically future-ready, geopolitically, technologically, and regulatorily. The challenges facing companies are increasing, while resilience and adaptability are becoming ever more important at the same time. Building resilient value chains also holds great potential for Germany as a business location.

Around 400 participants came to the Coppenrath Innovation Center in Osnabrück last Thursday. The renovated former locomotive shed now houses the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), laboratories of the agricultural machinery manufacturers Krone and Grimme, as well as numerous startups. On two stages and in several workshop rooms, we presented a comprehensive program that in the morning provided current findings on framework conditions ranging from global agricultural trade to the impacts of climate change. In the afternoon, the focus then shifted to the question of what appropriate responses might look like, and which concepts and solutions will become relevant. In doing so, we deliberately relied on many different but future- and solution-oriented perspectives: the speakers thus represented many important stakeholders in the agri-food sector.

Jörg Reuter, founder and managing director of Reuter Campus Berlin, and Lea Fließ, managing director of the Forum for Modern Agriculture, set a clear emphasis. Reuter put forward two key theses: “Food tech is not a consumer need. At best, it is an enabler of consumer needs.” The more sustainability-related needs are currently changing, the more relevant technological solutions will become. “Over the past ten years, food tech has led to replacing nature instead of helping it. What if food tech were simply used intelligently? It is time to rethink commodity raw materials.”

Lea Fließ observed that despite many good debates about agriculture, thinking often remains trapped in dualistic images that have a blocking effect. Agriculture is currently on the verge of one of the most exciting innovation leaps of our time. However, society expects future viability, not just new tools. Trust does not emerge through PR, but through effort. Trust is created through storytelling – and certainly not through defensive battles. It emerges through encounters, through conversations that close the gap between perception and reality. Resilience does not begin in the field. Resilience begins in the mind.