On July 25, 2025, Steinbeis awarded the Steinbeis Foundation Transfer Award – Löhn Award for outstanding projects and achievements in entrepreneurial knowledge and technology transfer. The award goes to the project team led by the Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Institute of the Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Gesellschaft für transferorientierte Forschung gGmbH der Steinbeis-Stiftung (FSG), which, together with Ferdinand Steinbeis Reallabor GmbH, LLS Logistik GmbH, SICK AG, Liebherr-Hydraulikbagger GmbH, and Leadec FM BV & Co. KG.
The award-winning “Digital Platform Transport (DPT)” project exemplifies the Ferdinand Steinbeis Society's dual understanding of science. The goal was to develop and pilot a cooperative business model in the field of intralogistics. The starting point was the question of how industrial service is changing in the context of digitalization (IoT, digital twins, and AI) and how a cyber-physical business model based on digital twins and cooperative data rooms can be designed.
The project risen to LLS Logistik GmbH, a new ecosystem of partners Leadec FM BV & Co. KG, Liebherr-Hydraulikbagger GmbH, and Sick AG, under the leadership of the Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Institute of the Ferdinand-Steinbeis-Gesellschaft. The consortium offers a cooperative service package for internal transport based on digital twins of forklift trucks – a solution that has been proven to have great market potential and viability. LLS Logistik GmbH acts as a scalable project company, enabling the partners to operate jointly on the market with low entry barriers. It is a practical example of the “New Mittelstand”: cooperative, digital, and growth-oriented.
The key to the project's success is interdisciplinarity, cultural change in established companies, and actively closing the (transfer) gap between idea and implementation. The project shows medium-sized companies how shared expertise and cooperative value creation with new business models can enable repositioning and thus innovation in the ecosystem.
LLS Logistik GmbH is already generating sustainable sales and winning customers—proof of the successful entrepreneurial transfer. The next phase is scaling, with goals including the expansion of service bundles and services for new solutions in the field of intralogistics within the framework of use cases.