Nadja Hatzijordanou is a doer. “Are you a doer or a coward?” Her father always asked. He came to Germany from Greece with his parents when he was four, his father was a bus driver, his mother a cashier at Penny. He himself studied and now has his own architecture office. “My father is proud that he is a doer,” says Hatzijordanou. “And he passed that on to me.”
What exactly Hatzijordanou does: digitization. The 36-year-old aims to bring the traditional Hamburg-based machine manufacturer Körber into the digital world. At Körber, she checks whether ideas that arise in the company can be used to found her own start-ups. She didn’t know the company until she came across the job posting. “Then I learned: They are not that small.” To be more precise: Körber is really big. More than 10,000 employees build machines for the production, testing and packaging of medicines, toilet paper and cigarettes, among other things. The Körber Digital division has been around for a number of years, which aims to use artificial intelligence to increase production efficiency. “The idea was that we have been successful with what we have done so far – but now we have to go a new digital path in order to be successful in the future,” says Hatzijordanou.
After completing her studies, she co-founded a start-up herself, which was more of a coincidence. An acquaintance of the mother’s was looking for someone who knew about the economic side of companies. Hatzijordanou had just finished studying business administration and wanted “to be a successful entrepreneur”. So together they founded a start-up for ceramic parts in special shapes. “I was responsible for everything that the technical founders didn’t feel like doing,” she says: finances, sales, marketing, discussions with investors. She learned a lot, but at some point she realized that the idea would never turn into really big business. “At that point, I still lacked experience,” she says. “Today I would certainly question and assess the chances of a company differently. And above all, I would better choose the team to start up with.”
What makes a good start-up has become its business. Among other things, she worked as a coach at the Hasso Plattner Institute, the Potsdam IT research facility of the SAP co-founder. The results of your doctorate are also incorporated. She dealt with how start-ups can better assess the competition.
The first Körber spin-off started with Hatzijordanou’s support last autumn. Factorypal has developed an algorithm that improves the cooperation between different machines in the manufacture of toilet paper and kitchen rolls. Hatzijordanou works with colleagues from all areas. If, for example, a founder has a question for a data researcher, she establishes the contact. Sometimes she encounters resistance, but the initial skepticism is slowly fading, she says. “We don’t want to be perceived as the hip digital fuzzis, we want to create concrete added value,” she says. “And that is only possible if you work together trustingly with colleagues from the other business areas.”