Innovation and applied research

Digitalization increasingly transforms all areas of the tax consultants’ and lawyers’ profession and those of their clients. In order to be prepared for these changes DATEV develops innovative solutions for tomorrow together with its customers, partners, and institutions of higher education.

Artificial intelligence. Big data. Blockchain. New technologies change our future fast and profoundly. Digital transformation creates new business models and changes the working environment.

Jointly creating innovation

DATEV’s innovation management is the framework for DATEV’s innovation, creating a general setup for new projects. They are accompanied all the way: from deriving potentials from developments in the market, legislation, society, and technology via target-oriented idea generation and evaluation through to marketability.

Innovation is an open process in cooperation with customers as well as partners from science and economy.

Exploring future customer demands

In order to support the future viability of tax consultants and their clients under these rapidly changing conditions DATEV lab was founded. Its goal is to discover potentials early, deduce and assess disruptive business models. The lab is based on the fail fast principle and co-creation of ideas with customers, start-ups, enterprises, and institutions of higher education.

Technology projects with partners

As IT enterprise DATEV depends on technological innovation. Besides inhouse projects it networks with partners from the field of science – even with start-ups and institutions of higher education – and cooperates in applied development projects of key technologies such as machine learning or knowledge graphs.

The spectrum of collaborations ranges from informal exchanges through smaller student research papers and projects from doctoral and master’s degree candidates to strategic consortium projects.

Blockchain and distributed ledger technology

DATEV is a pioneer for accounting techniques as well as provider of new services and solutions for both tax consultancies and enterprises. Blockchain technology is a basis which can support the DATEV ecosystem in future.