Digital Female Leader Award: These are the winners

The final prize goes to Katharina Schmidt, CEO and co-founder of Apic.ai. The company is dedicated to the so-called automated pollinator monitoring. With this, she wants to make a contribution against the worldwide insect extinction. With the help of camera-based technology, bees can be used as biosensors. The technology is installed at the entrance to the hives and is intended to create quantitative data on the effects of pesticides, for example. By detecting effects such as a reduction in activity or pollination behavior that were previously not measurable, it is hoped to improve risk assessment for pesticides. Schmidt, the award winner, came up with the idea for the company when she became involved with the issue of insect mortality as an amateur beekeeper. She realized that countermeasures are difficult without suitable data. She now wants to collect such data with Apic.ai.

Ursula Mühle has dedicated herself to digitization in the healthcare sector since the beginning of her career, built up the Graduate School of Information Science in Health at the Technical University of Munich for this purpose, analyzed the implementation of systems in the public sector for PwC, and today heads the Task Force Care at the Bavarian State Office for Health and Food Safety. She will receive the award in the Career category on Day 17. In her role as head of the nursing task force, she initiated a digital online portal that always provides up-to-date information on the Corona pandemic situation in nursing homes anonymously and in compliance with data protection laws. She is also building a Europe-wide "Digital Health Learning Platform" and supporting an information campaign against old-age poverty among women.

The next winner in the "IT-Tech" category has a big goal: Katharina Schüller wants to create a global standard for Data & AI Literacy. The collection and evaluation of data and the ethical handling of artificial intelligence are to be firmly incorporated into the curricula of schools and universities. To this end, Schüller has launched a project together with the Federation of National Statistical Societies, the AI Campus Berlin, the Stifterverband and the OECD. She has also published guidelines for data literacy courses at universities, a charter, and the app "City, Country, Data Flow." In 2003, she founded her own company that analyzes corporate data sets and derives recommendations from them.

The Corona pandemic has boomed the second-hand market. The start-up Mädchenflohmarkt, founded in 2012 by then 22-year-old Maria Spilka, also benefited from this. She is the award winner in the "Lifestyle" category. Her company Mädchenflohmarkt offers both second-hand fashion for sale and the opportunity to send in your own clothes and sell them via the platform - for which the company receives a commission. It also works with companies such as About You or Breuninger and organizes their second-hand business. In 2020, the start-up grew by 50 percent and generated a double-digit million turnover.

Salome Preiswerk is the winner of the 14th day of the Journey to Diversity. She wins the category "FinTech Money." Preiswerk founded the digital asset management company Whitebox together with Birte Rothkopf in 2016. The law graduate started her career in management consulting and then worked for various credit institutions. Preiswerk also advises the German government on the Fintech Council. Based on a value approach, Whitebox offers digital asset management by investing in ETFs.

On Day 13, the "New Work" category will be crowned. The award winner is Daniela Steens, who works at DB Fernverkehr. She heads the "Modern Working Worlds" project there and introduced two apps for employees to make shift planning more individual and easier. Shifts can easily be swapped or planned by the employees themselves. A trained travel agent with a degree in economics, she has worked in various areas of the DB Group since the beginning of her career.

The twelfth prize goes to Anna Weber. She is co-CEO of Babyone and is honored in the "Digital Transformation" category because her company is undergoing just such a transformation process. On January 1, 2021, Weber took over Babyone from her parents together with her brother Jan-Willem Weischer. Especially since the Corona crisis, the baby specialty store has had to become more digital. So the company is taking some steps to become fitter for the future. Among other things, Weber is having the workrooms at the company headquarters redesigned for more flexible working. Money is also being invested in the company's IT infrastructure. In addition, online and offline retailing are being increasingly networked. Employees are learning with the help of an e-learning platform. The next step in the transformation: An innovation hub, supported by an advisory board of start-up entrepreneurs, is to be established.

Ursula Wolf is the winner of the award in the "Health" category, which was presented on the eleventh day of the "Journey to Diversity." The specialist in internal medicine heads pharmacotherapy management at Halle University Hospital. She tackled her field of activity in a particularly digital way. After taking over as head of pharmacotherapy management, she made it possible, among other things, to capture a "digital overall picture" of a patient within six and a half minutes - including all important aspects of the disease, diagnoses, cardiovascular data, laboratory values, ECG and diagnostic findings. In this way, she was able to adjust the patient's medication list entirely on the basis of specialist information and interactions. Her model led her to international publications, the option of a post-doctoral qualification and a planned promotion to senior physician, among other things.

Lelia König receives the tenth prize in the "Mobility" category. At the end of 2019, she and her partner Sandro Beck founded the start-up Dashfactory, which produces dashcams for bicycles. The recorded data is analyzed anonymously and can be taken into account in the traffic planning of cities and municipalities. The start-up now employs 13 people and works with the city of Leipzig.

The next winner already has a lot of expertise in her industry: Dana von der Heide used to work at Deutsche Post and is a member of the advisory board of the German Logistics Association. With her logistics start-up Parcel Perform, founded in 2016, she secured the prize in the "Innovation" category. Merchants can use the parcel tracking software to provide their customers with a more accurate arrival date for their ordered goods. The start-up works with more than 600 logistics companies worldwide to do this.

She's already an award winner, now she can add another award to the list: Nancy Wang won the Digital Leadership category. The U.S. native is a managing director at Amazon Web Services and built several startups like Rubrik. In 2017, she founded the organization Advancing Women in Tech, which aims to give women and other marginalized groups in the tech industry more visibility and connect them with each other. The organization also has a headquarters in Berlin.

At the Journey to Diversity, one category in particular can't be missed, of course: The award for "Diversity" goes to Olaolu Fajembola and Tebogo Niminde-Dundadegar of the Berlin-based start-up Tebalou. They ensure more diversity in children's rooms and sell everything a child's heart desires, from puzzles to handicrafts to dolls. The focus is on identification and representation: the doll is black, the pencils for skin coloring contain all possible shades of people, and the puzzle ends up with the country Ghana. The founders are also authors of the book "Give Me Skin Color," which helps adults deal with racism in their children's education.

On the sixth day, Freda Katunda received the award in the "Social Hero" category. With her start-up Leap, she offers courses on healthcare for the African continent via an e-learning platform. This enables people to gain knowledge at a low level, and Katunda hopes for an increase in medical professionals and a worldwide exchange of knowledge and experience. To this end, the company works with healthcare institutions, and the courses cover topics such as nutrition in chronic diseases, an overview of current drug research, and the use of data in the healthcare system.

The prize in the "Entrepreneurship" category was won by the founders of Codary GmbH, Antonia Schein and Amanda Maiwald. The award was presented on November 12, also in Berlin. The company is a digital education provider that aims to provide young people with programming training. In weekly video chats, students teach children between the ages of 10 and 16 programming languages such as Python in small groups. This is intended to be playful and user-friendly because of the young target group. A learning app and a learning platform on the Internet are also intended to support children. In this way, the introduction to computer science should be successful - and fun. More than 400 young users are now involved.

Influencer Florentine Kleemann won the Audience Award. The medical student has been providing information about the Corona pandemic on her Instagram channel @fleurbardot since March 2020. Meanwhile, almost 18,000 subscribers follow her explanatory videos and posts, with which she wants to allay fears and contribute to overcoming the pandemic. Kleemann has also caught the attention of some collaborative partners: She stars in the ZDF documentary series "Heart & Viruses" and is an ambassador for the German Center for Cardiovascular Research and the German Heart Center Berlin.

Anne Kriesel received the award in the "Purpose Communications" category on November 10. She is the founder of the digital network Bohana.de, where mourners can network with grief counselors and funeral directors after the death of a fellow human being. The platform also provides information about funerals, mourning and preparing for one's own death. Kriesel does completely without investor and advertising money: All information is to be available to mourners free of charge. For its platform it could win 120 partners from the funeral and mourning industry since the start in the past year. Three times a year, Kriesel invites them to a virtual exchange with an impulse lecture.

The second prize was awarded on November 9 in the "Legal" category - and also in Berlin. It went to Alisha Andert, a fully qualified lawyer. The co-founder of the consulting firm "This is Legal Design" has set herself the task of designing innovations at the interface between people, law and technology: Through her work, she aims to help law firms, legal departments, corporations, legal protection insurers, and the public sector develop - and deploy - digital solutions that work. Andert is also chair of the board of the Legal Tech Association. As part of this role, she supported the law to promote consumer-friendly offerings on the legal services market, which was passed in the Bundestag. This is intended to be an important step in enabling lawyers to develop digital business models.

On the first day of the Journey to Diversity, November 8, the first prize has already been awarded. The tour starts in Berlin: the Digital Female Leader Award in the category "Global Hero" is given to Dr. Julia Stamm. She launched " The Futures Project" (TFP) in 2019, a non-profit and globally active initiative. TFP's mission is to advocate for a better future through innovation and systems change. To achieve this, the initiative aims to promote and connect people from around the world who are fighting for this goal. For example, TFP organizes a fellowship program for people who are driving social and technological innovation.