[Video] From Gaming to Industry: David Erhard on the Community-Building Mindset

In the first installment of the SXC Community Member Spotlight Series, David Erhard — Head of the Siemens Xcelerator Community — traces a career that moves from early internet culture to freemium gaming models to industrial community strategy. He talks about the core difference between gaming and professional communities (it comes down to whose time is on the line), what it took to convince Siemens leadership that community was worth investing in, and why the Circles model is what he's most excited about scaling in 2026. Along the way, he shares stories about a blockchain energy startup in South America that almost slipped through the cracks and an early character-building adventure.

Full Transcript

Brian Pagels: Welcome everyone. We're starting a new series here on the Siemens Xcelerator Community. We thought it would be interesting to conduct a series of interviews where we allow you all to get to know some of each other a little better. We're starting this member profile interview series and we thought, who better to start with than David, the head of the Siemens Xcelerator Community. We're delighted to have him here with us today. I'm Brian Pagels from the consulting partner Structure3C, where I'm Chief Strategy Officer, and have been doing a lot of the work behind the scenes on the Siemens Xcelerator Community. So, David, why don't you introduce yourself?

David Erhard: Thanks Brian. Great to be here. Very excited to be kicking this off with you. My name is David. I'm head of community for the Siemens Xcelerator Community, out of Nuremberg, in Germany. We've been running the community for the past one and a half years, building it gradually, and that's been mainly my role on the Siemens Xcelerator team. Siemens Xcelerator for us is our business platform where we bring together thought leaders, our partner ecosystem, and our customers around a portfolio that is changing industry and driving digital transformation. The community is our layer on top of that business platform where we want to bring together the right minds and the right peers to solve challenges that are bigger than any one of us. We've already talked to a lot of people, gotten a lot of good feedback for what we're doing here, and I'm excited to keep on building this community.

Brian Pagels: Why don't you give us a little bit of your background — getting to know you, David. I know you're based in Nuremberg now. Where are you originally from? What were some of your interests at a young age?

David Erhard: I'm originally from Nuremberg, actually — born and raised here in Franconia, Bavaria. I just recently came back. Growing up, we had a household full of tech geeks and nerds. We were always the first with our hands on the latest gadgets and tech in the house, thanks to my dad. That helped me very early on to know that technology is something I'm really, really interested in. I was the first with an internet connection at home, back in school. I had all my friends over and we explored the new internet when it all started, when we were teenagers. So it was really cool back then, and I knew quite early that I wanted to do something around that in my career.

David Erhard: I took a lot of different routes to figure out what I wanted to do in life. Being involved with gaming as a teenager eventually led me into the games industry, where I felt my passion for gaming and my passion for technology were coming together at the right place. For the first ten to twelve years of my career, I spent in gaming. I worked on some very popular brands — Electronic Arts, EA Sports FIFA, Command and Conquer, the Settlers franchise. It's an incredible industry that is always a bit forward-running, very passionate, very creative. David Erhard: But at some point I said, I need a change. I want to see something different. I had to promise my parents to do something proper. I was looking into my next step and stumbled across an opportunity at Siemens — building an operating system in the cloud for machinery. Making sense of machines, connecting to applications, reading data, coming up with insights. That really fascinated me because I had never been close to the industry, but it sounded familiar and I really wanted to learn more. I interviewed at Siemens, got the job, and became one of the first community managers there — really inventing and investing in community as a concept for developer communities. That eventually led me to where I am now, in a very strategic role building the Siemens Xcelerator Community together with our partners.

Brian Pagels: Just to double back for a second — how did you go from gaming enthusiast to being so involved in that industry, working for some of the leading players? David Erhard: It's a small industry. When I started my career in gaming, I was working with the first freemium and free-to-play models. Back then, those were very new. Mobile devices weren't really popular for gaming yet — it was just the first couple of iterations of iPhones on the market. I had that feeling early on that this was going to become a huge trend, so I spent a lot of time digging into free-to-play and freemium mechanics. How do players access these? How do they respond to them? What can you build for people that is a value add rather than a rip-off? We invested quite a lot of time shaping some of the very first freemium models in gaming for some of the biggest brands. That background eventually led into the FIFA and EA Sports franchise, where we explored whether we could create a free FIFA game with a freemium model — which eventually became Ultimate Team, where you build your dream squad with booster packs. That's still one of the most successful freemium models in the gaming space today.

Brian Pagels: What do you see as the connection, if any, between managing gaming communities and the work you're doing now at Siemens? David Erhard: It is very different, to be honest. In gaming, we always dealt with players who gave us their most sacred thing — their time, their free time. People who spend their own money on something to enjoy, to chill out, to get over something. They're really invested. In a professional community like this, people are investing their work time. It's still a time investment and people still need to voluntarily give it for some kind of value exchange, but the emotional dynamic is different. When it's their own money and their own free time, they're more invested on a personal level.

David Erhard: The product is also so different. A game is very different from what we do now in industry, and thus the communication is different — more professional in many ways. Back in the day we had IRC chats and in-game community communication. Now it's business communities with different tools and mechanics. But ultimately, you're still dealing with people. On the other side of the screen there's always a human being with a shared interest in what you're providing. That is the one thing where community will never change — it's humans talking to humans, and that's the greatest part of it.

Brian Pagels: I want to double-click on the cultural element, because I'm curious. Siemens is obviously a legacy brand — it's been around for 175 years. But what we've been doing with the Siemens Xcelerator Community feels a little distinct from that brand. It has more of a startup energy to it. How do you see Siemens balancing that kind of brand legacy with building something that feels really new with the Xcelerator Community?

David Erhard: We are a pretty old company — we've been around for quite some time. But we've always been changing. We've been involved in so many technological changes and disruptions that we've always been a very innovative company, even if we don't always shout about it. What we're doing now is a little bit of the evolution of Siemens. We're thinking more about platforms, about how we can make our knowledge more accessible, how we can become more transparent. We understand that the challenges in society and industry right now are huge — massive — and a lot of our peers, customers, and partners are all in the same boat.

David Erhard: We understand that in many ways we are a market leader, and people are looking to us for answers. They come to us with questions like, how do we navigate this AI disruption? Who has figured it out? And that's exactly where a community can help it make sense. For a market leader like Siemens, building and running a community is absolutely crucial — and there are a lot of people who expect that from us.

David Erhard: There will also be new companies, especially now in this new era with AI, who may not be so familiar with what Siemens has done in the past. But we still need to be accessible, still need to be visible to them. That's exactly where a community can close that gap — to get involved with other people who are similar to you, working in the same industry, sharing the same challenges, following the same trends. We haven't fully figured it out yet, and that's actually a lot of new territory for us as a company. But the feedback so far is totally on our side. We get a lot of good credit for what we're doing and for the vision we've laid out.

Brian Pagels: You've obviously been invested in community and an advocate for it for some time. Would you share a story about the role community has played in your life or your career that might be interesting to our audience?

David Erhard: Of course. Gaming and community was always something a bit special. Community was rather a support-centric function for most companies back then. When I started working in community management, out of ten people I met, ten had no idea what community management was. I always had to explain that my role is about product and about people.

David Erhard: When I moved to Siemens after ten years in gaming, where community was quite popular, it was pretty astonishing to me that I had to start from scratch — explaining what community is, because at industrial companies like Siemens, it simply wasn't a thing yet. People couldn't quite understand how it could help fill a pipeline, drive revenue, or develop partnerships. It felt like a full circle — like going back to the start and answering all the same questions I'd answered years before, but in a very different language. The way I had to communicate the added value of community for an industrial company was very different from how I'd sold it in gaming.

David Erhard: There was actually a specific story from when we started the Siemens Xcelerator Community. Early on, we only had a comment function under product pages on the marketplace — just a place for people to leave a question. There was a comment sitting there for over three months that nobody had noticed. It was from a blockchain energy community in South America, and they were really looking for someone at Siemens to work with. They had no idea how to reach us, so they tried through the comment function. By accident, I found that comment. I got in touch with the person, learned more about what they needed, and connected them with the right person in the business unit. As far as I know, there's still a project running in South America with a blockchain-driven energy community.

Brian Pagels: That's a great story. I'm sure everyone involved is thankful you found that comment. Tell us something about yourself that we might not know — something not on your resume. How do you spend your time outside of work?

David Erhard: There's one fun story I like to share. When I was around 15 years old, I had this urge to do something really far away from home — something so random that everyone around me, my family, my friends, my school, would just scratch their heads. I actually started working on a fishing boat when I was 15. Growing up on the countryside in Bavaria, far away from the ocean, that was a bit crazy. My parents actually drove me there. I had found someone operating a fishing boat, called him, asked if I could work for a bit, and he said yes. So my parents dropped me off and said, see you in two weeks.

David Erhard: I went onto that fishing boat and we worked and lived on it for that time. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done. It was around Easter time — ice cold. I was seasick the entire time, couldn't really sleep. It was horrible. But there were these moments: you're in the middle of the ocean, there are sandbanks with seals, and the sun is just about to rise. You've just worked three hours through the night, there's some crappy song on the radio, and you're out on the ocean with the seals and the sunrise. In that moment? Not that bad. I always look back on that time, and whenever it's about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty, I remember what I did then. It was the toughest thing I ever did, but I'm so grateful for it — and it's not on my resume.

Brian Pagels: There's a lot to that — the unknown, the adventure, but also the character building. No matter who you are or where you wind up, those early experiences of working hard and seeing things from a different perspective can be really formative.

David Erhard: Absolutely. It changes and shapes you.

Brian Pagels: Speaking of change — what's coming down the line for the Xcelerator Community in 2026? What are you most excited about?

David Erhard: There's a lot. What we did in the last year was really establish a great foundation. We played around with a lot of features and functionalities, explored what works well and what doesn't, and came up with many different content formats. We've had great conversations with thought leaders and futurists on the platform.

David Erhard: Most recently, we've started getting our Circles program up and running. Circles for us are micro communities — expert groups that we invite into a focused space to have organized conversations around specific topics. We have one around Future Food right now, which we're developing into something really cool with an NGO. We're bringing together people from across the industry to talk about challenges, where it's headed, how we can speed things up, how we can partner.

David Erhard: What I hear consistently when I talk to community members within Siemens and with our partners is: I would love to be in a group of people like me, with a shared interest and similar challenges — but they're so hard to find, and I don't know how to organize something like that. By operating these Circles, we do exactly that. We help businesses and partners within our ecosystem get the right people together, with the right technical infrastructure — synchronous, asynchronous, online, offline, both — organized and moderated in a proper, legally sound framework. I want to scale that. If we eventually have ten, fifteen, twenty of these micro communities on the platform, they will start to benefit each other — members will connect across Circles, and that's exactly why we wanted the community and why we built it. I'm super excited to do more of that in 2026 and beyond.

Brian Pagels: Well, I'm excited as well. Thank you David for your time today. This has been a real pleasure getting to know you, both personally and professionally. Stay tuned for the next in this series.

David Erhard: Thank you Brian, and thanks everybody.