The first edition of the Inmerge Innovation Summit, which took place on June 29th at the Brandenburg Gate, was an official GITEX Europe side event. There, panels on leadership, trust, and AI explored how Berlin could serve as a bridge to Central Eurasia.
Berlin hosted the first German edition of the Inmerge Innovation Summit at the Brandenburger Tor. The event, organized around four pillars — an innovation summit, an investment forum, a ventures track and a corporate innovation engine — set out to connect the Middle East, the former Soviet space, Eastern Europe and Central Eurasia with European capital and corporate partners.
Hannah Boomgaarden, Open Innovation Director at Plug and Play and host of the event, framed Berlin’s role as a city building bridges with Eastern Europe. Thughra Musayeva of Pasha Financial Holding, the summit’s first speaker, described Baku as a region of untapped potential and positioned Inmerge as an ecosystem in which startups engage directly with investors. Nasimi Aghayev, Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Berlin, said the country’s historic role connecting trade caravans across Eurasia is now being reinvented through fiber-optic and innovation infrastructure. The next edition of Inmerge is scheduled for October in Baku.
A recurring theme of the morning session was leadership under uncertainty. Martin Gutmann, a professor at the Lucerne School of Business, challenged attendees to reconsider who gets celebrated as a leader. Comparing the polar expeditions of Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton, Gutmann argued that the business world tends to glorify the most dramatic survival stories rather than the leaders who quietly prevent crises altogether. He described this as a fundamental bias: confidence and storytelling are routinely mistaken for competence. Effective leaders, he said, focus on mundane operational details, communicate values with pragmatism and demonstrate humility — a trait he linked directly to higher team productivity and a greater willingness to absorb feedback. He cited former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s preparation before D-Day as examples of humility functioning as a leadership advantage rather than a weakness.
A panel on rebuilding financial bridges between Europe and Eurasia brought together Rza Aliyev, chief strategy officer at NGIC; Ekaterina Galitsyna, director of business development at KfW IPEX-Bank; Bahruz Naghiyev, deputy CEO of Pasha Bank; and Zuzana Franz, managing director at Oddo BHF. Panelists agreed that project finance in the region hinges on bankability, cooperation and trust, with KfW IPEX-Bank emphasizing its mandate to support German exporters into markets such as Uzbekistan, which was described as open to new trade-finance instruments, and Kazakhstan, seen as increasingly linked to bond markets and green mobility projects. Turkmenistan was characterized as still largely closed to foreign capital, while Azerbaijan was described as resource-rich and undergoing rapid modernization.
Compliance and risk management dominated much of the banking discussion. Oddo BHF’s Franz noted that correspondent banking relationships in the region have roughly doubled in recent years, requiring tighter systems to manage anti-money-laundering and due-diligence obligations. Naghiyev pointed to Pasha Bank’s recent private IPO in Azerbaijan, calling it evidence that regional institutions can meet international transparency standards. Several panelists noted that resolved regional conflicts in the Caucasus mark a step toward greater stability for cross-border business.
A second panel, moderated by Maria Ivanova, co-founder of the Gingo Foundation, examined the relationship between leadership and organizational culture. Gutmann distinguished management, which he characterized as predictable, from leadership, which he said must navigate the unpredictable, arguing that a leader’s true character only becomes visible during moments of crisis. Ad Boon, deputy CEO of Pasha Holding, said leadership is ultimately about defining what an organization stands for and staying attuned to events outside the company, adding that consistency and humility remain essential even as artificial intelligence reshapes organizational culture.
A third panel addressed how AI and big tech can serve as a bridge between Berlin’s startup labs and emerging markets. Alexandra Begue, hub principal at SAP, described the company’s global co-innovation hub as a deliberate effort to involve customers directly in product development from the earliest stages, citing a robotics initiative that began with a German startup and expanded to China with the involvement of roughly 40 customer organizations. Mehti Aslanov, group AI officer at Pasha, said emerging markets often function as testing grounds for technology developed in the West, provided governance, risk and access-to-talent challenges are addressed early. Mammad Karim, partner at Caucasus Ventures, said his firm — which invests across eleven countries — sees innovation increasingly as a matter of scale rather than geography, encouraging startups to expand from local markets into Europe and the United States. Valeria Sadovykh of Microsoft warned that fragmented national compliance regimes risk slowing innovation across the region, arguing that trust in AI ultimately depends on the readiness of the underlying data and the governance built around it.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de