Team

Maren Courage, Founder & Managing Director,
Head of Events

was engaged as director and actress at various theatres in Germany and Austria, including the Salzburg Festival, the Salzburg Schauspielhaus, the Vienna Raimundtheater and the Heidelberg Stadttheater. There she dealt with multimedia extensions of her productions at an early stage. Another focus of your work is Branded Content. As Managing Director of the Hamburg-based company Future Entertainment, Maren has carried out projects for clients such as Warner, Universal and Porsche in which feature films and brands were advertised and communicated using new digital tools. Since 2016, Maren Courage, as founder of the VR Business Club, has hosted and organized over 200 events for executives of medium-sized and large companies.

Oliver Autumn, Founder & Managing Director,
Head of Partnerships

has been involved in leading positions in various companies in software development and corporate venture capital for 30 years. Along with the former. Head of German Railways and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the AEG Group Dr. Heinz Dürr, he and netcoach GmbH were the world’s first provider of multimedia experience management for customers such as Audi, Voith and Siemens. After the trade sale of the company, he advised venture capitalists and private entrepreneurs on the development of new business models in the course of digitization. As managing director of the Hamburg-based company Future Entertainment, he worked for clients such as Warner Bros. Entertainment, Universal Pictures and Porsche. Oliver Autumn has been managing the VR Business Club dialogue and matchmaking platform together with Maren Courage since 2016.

Petra Isabel Schlerit, Head of VR Business Club Spaces, Managing Director of our member XR-C Academy

is Dipl. VR Coach© & Developer and is considered the subject matter expert in using virtual reality (VR) as a highly effective technology in business. Coming from management & tax consulting, she was head of finance and human resources in medium-sized companies for many years. She has also been involved in leadership development and change management for over 25 years. Today Petra is a Top100 trainer, mediator and business coach. Petra accompanies, as a sparring partner in management coaching, companies in their strategic developments. Her company XR-C Academy advises and qualifies on the use of VR, sets sound quality standards and ethics rules for dealing with this technology and offers its own leadership & people development programs in virtual reality. In the VR Business Club, she manages our members’ concerns about VR collaboration.

Michael Alf, Head of VR Business Club SparX, Managing Director of our member New World Events

Over the course of his long career, Michael has held leadership positions at Capgemini, Asciano (Australia) and Matrix42 (Germany / Australia). In addition to topics such as digital transformation, digital marketing, he began conducting interactive virtual summits over the Internet with thousands of participants back in 2015. Based on these experiences, he wrote his book, “Virtual Summit Formula.” Together with the international team of his company, New World Events, he has executed numerous virtual and hybrid premium events in recent years. Michael is constantly monitoring the development of emerging potential technologies in the event, VR, and metaverse environments, and for several years has been a dedicated participant in the VR/AR/MR area. As a member of the VR Business Club, he is head of the VR Business Club SparX section and moderator of the English format: VR Cast.

Dr. Rolf Illenberger, VR Business Club Experte for Corporate Metaverse,
CEO of our member VRdirect

Dr. Rolf Illenbeger was already a managing director at ProSiebenSat.1 Digital and several years as a management consultant for technology topics. Rolf is also a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Expert Council on Metaverse as well as the Metaverse Standards Forum and a speaker on VR and Metaverse. As founder and CEO of VRdirect, he works with his solutions for large companies. At companies such as Siemens, Nestle and Henkel, its standard software has been used for virtual reality projects for various use cases such as Training/HR, Virtual Tours/Digital Twins and Marketing & Sales. At the VR Business Club, he serves as an expert on corporate metaverse issues for our members.

Jutta Engel, VR Business Club Expert for Brand Strategy,
CEO of our member Excellent Experiences

Jutta Engel has been focusing on the topic “What makes brands strong (in the future)!” for many years. Due to her cross-industry management experience, which she gained through various management positions in well-known companies – such as e.g. BMW Group, ARD/BR & Sternstunden e.V. – Jutta has a solid background in the fields of Strategic Corporate Development, Brand Strategy and Experiences as well as Corporate Social Responsibility. Ihre Projekte wurden mehrfach ausgezeichnet. As the person responsible for the BMW Group’s most important brand event, ‘100 YEARS BMW – THE NEXT 100 YEARS’, which went down in the history of the global corporation, she led the premium brand impressively into the future. To be sustainable, companies in the next economy must manage brands holistically and ecosystemically, as well as meet the needs of all internal and external stakeholders. That is why Jutta works with her clients to develop sustainable solutions for their transformation, based on the latest scientific findings.
At the VR Business Club, Jutta is active as an expert for our members’ concerns on the topic of brand strategy.

Daniel Wolff, VR Business Club Experte for Digital Industry Innovation in Automotive, Head of Collaborative Incubation of our member inpro

Daniel Wolff has been in leading position at inpro, a leading think tank and development center for digital industry innovation co-owned by Siemens and Volkswagen, for 20 years. Educated as a factory planner, Daniel has been involved in engineering and simulation for a long time. At inpro, he has been managing the Production Systems group and his team has generated various digital innovations for automotive, e.g. for digital project management in factory build-up, interactive equipment validation, or robotic engineering solutions. As member of the board of AutomationML e.V., he is co-shaping the future of I4 standards together with his team. He serves as an expert on automotive production for our members, focusing factory design and operation, manufacturing planning, predictive shopfloor optimization using artificial intelligence and digital twins, and interactive engineering and tryout using AI and XR technologies for large series production.

Lara Guyot, LL.B.
VR Business Club Expert for Digital Identities and Senior Associate at our member SKW Schwarz.

Lara Guyot is a lawyer at our long-standing member SKW Schwarz and specializes, among other things, in virtual identities, avatars and virtual influencers and the associated legal issues. Lara has extensive consulting experience in the consumer goods, pharmaceutical lifescience, advertising and branded content industries as an intellectual property specialist.

The use of virtual identities and avatars presents both challenges and significant potential. Within the VR Business Club, Lara informs our members about the legal aspects of these digital phenomena and assists them with related concerns. This includes areas such as copyright and personality rights as well as protection rights for avatars and digital creations, which provide protection against imitation, among other things.