I. T he digital society in 2016 – A Digital Strategy 2025 Technological progress is the driving force of our society. The innovation and new and continually improving methods and principles that come with it are the foundations of coexistence in modern society. These elements form and shape our communication, our economies, our working environments and our interactions – in the little things and on a wide scale. Technological advances are therefore always accompanied by changes in our world – improvement and steps forward. Today we are witnesses, participants and designers of these technological advances. Digitisation is already creating an intelligent, information-based, highly productive and interconnected world that only a few years ago was more a remote futuristic vision than a realistic scenario. In recent years, this process has driven creative transformation at a pace never seen before. Previously, technological change was a process spanning generations, and its overall impact was apparent only in retrospect. Today the development of digital technologies and innovations starting from interesting, but still diffuse experiments up to marketable mass products – or even global brands – is a matter of only years or maybe even months. The basic raw material of this digital transformation is data. How data is handled is a decisive factor in the success of modern business. Big Data is one of many buzzwords – a catch-all phrase for today’s unpreced­ ented magnitude of data. Data can capture more and more aspects of our everyday lives with increa­singly greater precision. Data is more and more frequently a decisive factor for success, for example for product developments of mid-size service providers or in Germany’s 7:1 upset in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on its path to the soccer world championship. In the long run, the key competencies of successful companies will revolve around collecting, processing, linking and protecting data – and the specific measures and methods these companies develop to carry out these tasks. The possibilities provided by the digital transformation are not however simply the stuff of economic prophecies and optimistic soccer fans’ fantasies of victory, but can rather be expressed in concrete numbers. Germany’s GDP could rise by an additional €82 billion if digital technologies and German companies’ ability to use them are aggressively pursued. The Internet of Things, that is, the smart connectiv­ ity of the myriad of sensors present in physical objects, is slated to provide economic growth of up to US$11 billion, with the largest share in the area of industrial production. In the services industry in particular, digital techno­ logies and the accompanying methods have made massive productivity improvements and entirely novel business models possible in recent years. Many sectors, for example music and entertainment or the creative industry, but also areas such as banking and tourism, have all taken more than just initial steps – they have developed new processes and pro­ ducts, have entered new markets and forged new partnerships. A busy German start-up community is embracing digital principles and creating technological and conceptual innovations that can provide substantial advantages to established companies and are open to new ideas. This includes for example customer-orientation of all business processes while at the same time optimising the use of resources, rapid prototyping of innovative concepts, more financial freedom and more generous time frames for investments. Technological progress that we today consider to be the driver of these developments is far from reach­ ing a final plateau or even slowing down. Today’s status quo is the basis for a constant flow of new concepts and methods that will influence entire