Topline2020: Home Simon-Kucher

Neelie Kroes currently serves on various (inter)national company boards, a.o. Salesforce. Also, she holds non-business positions at Foundation LittleBitz, Rijksmuseum Foundation, Women’s Heart and AMREF Flying Doctors.

Previously Neelie Kroes was Special Envoy for start-ups in the Netherlands and headed the StartupDelta initiative that boosts the Dutch start-up ecosystem and aims to place it among the top 3 ranked competitive ecosystems in Europe. Before that, Neelie Kroes served 11 years as EU Commissioner, the first term as EU Commissioner for Competition Policy and the second term as Commissioner in charge of the Digital Agenda for Europe. The last term she was also Vice-President of the European Commission.

Before the European Commission, Neelie Kroes was President of Nyenrode University from 1991-2000, and served on various company boards, including Lucent Technologies, Volvo and P&O Nedlloyd. From 1982-1989 she served as Minister for Transport, Public Works and Telecommunication in the Netherlands.

Neelie Kroes is an international advocate for the position of women in the tech industry and female entrepreneurship.
In 2007 and 2008 she was listed in the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women at the 59ste and 47ste position.

Dr. Werner Vogels is Chief Technology Officer at Amazon.com where he is responsible for driving the company's customer-centric technology vision.

As one of the forces behind Amazon's approach to cloud computing, he is passionate about helping young businesses reach global scale and transforming enterprises into fast-moving digital organizations.

Vogels joined Amazon in 2004 from Cornell University where he was a distributed systems researcher. He has held technology leadership positions in companies that handle the transition of academic technology into industry. Vogels holds a PhD from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam and has authored many articles on distributed systems technologies for enterprise computing.

Carsten Cramer, born on December 23, 1968 in Münster, began his professional career as Managing Director and Head of Marketing at the traditional football club “Preußen Münster”. He then moved to sports rights marketing agency "Ufa" (later "Sportfive"). There Cramer was first as a Sportfive team leader at Hamburger SV and from 2002 to 2007, finally in the same capacity, at BVB. From 2007 to 2010, Cramer was responsible for the nationwide marketing and sales business as Senior Vice-President at Sportfive headquarter in Hamburg (now "Lagardère Sports"), before joining Borussia Dortmund on October 1, 2010 as Director of Sales & Marketing. For some years, the digitization and internationalization strategy has also been a major focus of his work. His other functions at BVB include the co-management of BVB Merchandising GmbH and Sports & Bytes GmbH as well as the board activity in the BVB Foundation "Leuchte Auf". As of March 1, 2018, Carsten Cramer was appointed as managing director of Borussia Dortmund Geschäftsführungs-GmbH; he has joint representative authority with another managing director and is exempted from the restrictions of § 181 BGB.