Sinking into a book for several hours? Working with focus for an hour? It's getting harder and harder, and we keep getting distracted. Johann Hari, bestselling author of "Stolen Focus", explains why it is so difficult to focus on anything these days.

Das GDI hat zusammen mit der Unternehmensberatung Horváth & Partners AG das Impulspapier «Next Urban Retail» verfasst und blickt in die Zukunft des Handels. Auf Retail-as-a-Service, Micro-Hubs und Dark Retail sollten sich HändlerInnen jetzt ganz besonders konzentrieren.

Sind Geschwindigkeit und sofortige Verfügbarkeit alles? China-Experte Duncan Clark ist sich jedenfalls sicher, dass der Westen hier zurückliegt. In China bekäme man in neun Minuten Aspirin geliefert. Die Erwartung an eine sofortige Verfügbarkeit sei enorm. Was wir von Alibaba, Amazon und Co. lernen können, und wie es auch anders geht, das erfahren Sie in unserer neuesten Podcast-Folge.

Whether it's e-commerce retailers, shops, brands, advertisers, everyone is currently insecure, says tech analyst Benedict Evans. How unbundling is creating new business models and what the next tech trend is, Evans explains here in a video interview from the GDI Retail Summit.

As CEO of German DIY store Hornbach-Baumärkte, Erich Harsch manages 23,000 employees. In a GDI video interview, he talks about good leadership, the biggest challenges of a multichannel retailer and global supply chains.

Javier Goyeneche makes clothes out of plastic waste through his label Ecoalf. He says: "Instead of asking ourselves which earth we are leaving to our children, we should be concerned about which children we are leaving to the earth." Watch the whole video interview from the GDI Retail Summit here.

“We don’t have much consensus on what online privacy actually means, and most of what’s on the table conflicts fundamentally with competition,” writes tech thought leader and GDI speaker Benedict Evans in a blog post.

The dynamic in online retailing has been apparent since before the Covid-19 crisis: there is no retail concept that cannot be digitalised. But what about physical retail space? What should remain, what should disappear, what needs more space?

"All retailers could benefit from being a bit more paranoid and protective of their turf." This is what Sucharita Kodali, Vice President at the American market research company Forrester, says. This means that they should invest more in protecting their intellectual property and lobbying for laws in their favour, just like Google, Facebook and Co. are doing. Read an interview here. Sucharita Kodali spoke at the 71st International Retail Summit on 9 and 10 September 2021.

How do you manage your staff during a pandemic of unprecedented magnitude? What doesn't work at all in such a situation? One person who should know is Erich Harsch. As CEO of the Hornbach DIY group, he is responsible for 23,000 employees. How did his employees inspire him during the pandemic? Harsch discussed it all here in an interview, and at the 71st International Retail Summit.

The dematerialisation, demonetisation and democratisation of shopping has only just begun. Consumption as we know it today will cease to exist. Magic Commerce is one possible future scenario.

Most online shops today are based on the same 25-year-old tile design. Neha Singh, founder and CEO of the e-commerce platform Obsess, wants to change this with her 360-degree online shops. She explained why investors thought this was worth USD 3.4 million in a video and at the GDI International Retail Summit.