Fifteen years of answering the hard questions.

Give the Volkswagen Group a direct line into Asia's innovation ecosystems — and a dependable path to best-cost-country suppliers.

• Named technology scouting partner to the Volkswagen Group since 2015
• Startup scouting across Taiwan's ecosystem for Volkswagen Group Innovation
• RFQ development and best-cost-country supplier scouting in India for IAV

• A scouting relationship renewed across a decade
• One discovery sprint alone: 2,100 startups screened across three countries, 120 experts interviewed, 300 shortlisted
• Curated startup and supplier pipelines from a 15-country network
• Qualified best-cost-country suppliers in India, from RFQ to selection

Find frontier technologies for the vehicle across the world's innovation hotspots — and put Audi's leadership face to face with the sources.

• Six-market technology scouting across Asia, Israel, and the US
• The Brain-Wave Scouting project — wireless brain-wave sensing for the vehicle
• Hosted a full demo day at NASA and Lockheed Martin for Audi senior management

• A cross-continent scouting program feeding Audi's innovation pipeline
• Executive roadshows connecting leadership directly to technology sources
• Access to aerospace and defense R&D at NASA and Lockheed Martin

Audi came with three questions about a technology almost nobody could yet buy: what is the time to market, which materials matter, and what does it mean for the interface of the car. 4D printing — printed structures that change shape on their own — had roughly 90 patents worldwide against 4,000 a year for 3D printing. The honest risk was that it was a decade of research with no product in it.

• Ran the project in three declared phases — map the field, dig into the areas that survived, build a testable concept with named partners — so the client could stop after any one of them
• Stood up a dedicated technical team at Taiwan's High Speed 3D Printing Research Center: five researchers in metamaterials, lattice structures and high-speed additive manufacturing under the centre's director
• Interviewed and mapped an expert network of eleven principal investigators — RWTH Aachen, Purdue, Rutgers, Carnegie Mellon, ETH Zürich, KU Leuven, Michigan, Drexel, City University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang and Xi'an Jiaotong
• Catalogued and numbered well over a hundred candidate applications, then ranked them on three axes: impact of the application, maturity of the technology, and how easily it could progress with a real partner
• Assessed each candidate partner on scale, manufacturing depth and application fit — PhD headcount, patent position, digital-factory assets, automotive certification

• The material science was not the bottleneck — intelligent design was. Shape change with no mechanism is a design problem, and that is where we told Audi to put its money
• Of seven possible stimuli we narrowed to two that survive a car: electrical and mechanical. Water, pH and hot-air triggers do not belong in a vehicle
• Four concepts made it through to a costed path: a morphing smart textile, an auxetic steering wheel, an auxetic seat, and a quantum-dot window interface
• Each one was scoped to first parts in 12–16 weeks for €30–70K — and honestly marked at 18–30 months to industrial production testing

• A bleeding-edge technology turned into four concrete, gated commercial options instead of a trend report
• The lowest-risk entry named precisely: textile covers in the car trunk — not the morphing exterior everybody wants to talk about. Trunk covers first, interior skin at 12–16 months, exterior skin at 24–30
• A proposed brand-agnostic platform to keep connecting the research base to industry, because the two do not speak the same language

Innovation leadership set four questions: what does the automotive MicroLED landscape actually look like, where is the UX and positioning advantage, which applications come before display, and how will price develop. The answer had to be investment-grade — good enough to put in front of a board and defend.

• Mapped the compound-semiconductor value chain end to end — GaN epitaxy, chip, mass transfer, backplane, driver ASIC, module assembly — and located where cost and control actually sit
• Ran primary research: written technical interviews with the client's own principal display engineer, supplier and driver-IC calls, and intelligence gathered on the trade-show floor
• Scored 34 companies on eight weighted criteria into a client-editable scorecard, with a stance gate capping direct rivals regardless of their technology
• Built 21 figures, each badged verified, estimate or supplier-stated, and published a known-unknowns register beside them

• The decision was one of timing, not technology — and the design-in window for the 2028 start-of-production programmes was closing within two quarters
• Recommended the partner-ecosystem model of the five we costed: buy the chips, partner for mass transfer, own module assembly and the driver-ASIC IP. $50–150M over five years — against $500M–$1B+ for full vertical integration, and zero defensible IP for pure panel assembly
• Killed the LTPS backplane question outright: no LTPS capex, buy it behind an IP firewall, and target passive backplanes driven by µCMOS driver ICs instead. A wafer-level entry anchors at $50–100M of MOCVD capex — two orders of magnitude below a display fab
• Enter through exterior lighting, hidden interior surfaces and HUD light engines. Cost parity with tandem OLED arrives around 2032 for those entry types — and not within ten years for the standard cockpit panel. We said so plainly rather than sell the panel
• Named the field they are actually up against: ams OSRAM as the OEM benchmark with EVIYOS already in production, Marelli as the European Tier-1 challenger, Forvia Hella with Nichia on scale volume, and AUO with Aledia as a full-stack threat aimed straight at the cockpit

• A board-ready decision package and three named workstreams — partner, ecosystem, invest
• A cost deep-dive workshop convened with the lead chip supplier, anchored by a live demonstration
• A named European production route instead of a dependency on Asian capacity: licensing the MICLEDI process into GlobalFoundries Dresden, with a hard commercial gate at 20–30M units
• Dual-track sourcing written in — Ennostar on chips, Toray and 3D-Micromac as second transfer sources, Vistar as the LTPS alternative — so no single supplier holds the programme
• The engineering team's four challenges to the standard MicroLED story carried into the report rather than argued away

Find the Japanese AI and robotics companies that could make ABB's industrial and collaborative robots smarter — and qualify them well enough that ABB's own engineers could decide who was worth flying out to meet.

• Swept the Japanese ecosystem across edge inference silicon, perception and sensor fusion, reinforcement learning for motion, high-speed machine vision and 3D metrology
• Wrote a 27-field dossier on each of the fifteen companies that survived: stage, funding round and named investors, product maturity, USP and barrier to competition, IP position, application fields, existing corporate partners, team competencies, named competitors, and what the company itself said it needed
• Handed the file to ABB's Japan robotics team to grade A, B or C in their own words — and kept their comments verbatim
• Ran the roadshow for the companies ABB chose to meet

• Seven of the fifteen graded A by ABB's own engineers, three B, five C — and eight converted into a site-visit request
• The comments read like an engineering verdict, not a consultant's summary: a multi-axis controller that simplified robot motion control, a 3D vision sensor accurate enough for small-parts pick-and-assemble, process software aimed at exactly ABB's welding and cutting focus
• Two companies on that shortlist have since become among the best-known names in industrial and orbital robotics
• Where the answer was no, the file said no — humanoid platforms and total-solution system plays were graded C and dropped, with the reason written down

Jena, April 2024. A microoptics business with world-class technology and a strategy that had not yet been stress-tested.

• Facilitated the leadership team through a rebuilt SWOT — the existing strategy leaned on external opportunity and had barely examined internal strengths and weaknesses
• Widened a product strategy into a company strategy using the five-P frame: purpose, product, process, people, profit
• Fed an anonymous employee survey back into the room, so the strategy was tested against the people who would have to run it
• Agreed hard criteria for whether a project is worth doing at all: market potential, profitability, time to market, barriers to entry, scalability
• Identified and scored new application fields, then drafted the strategic roadmap

Jena, August 2024. Same team, a live Korean Tier-1 programme, and a different set of gates to clear.

• Wrote the practical field guide for the Korean programme: hierarchy and seniority in the room, where decisions are really made, meeting and negotiation etiquette
• Walked the automotive development process phase by phase, including what software-defined vehicles change about it
• Set out the quality and safety obligations — Korea-specific requirements, global standards, ISO 26262 and ASIL classification
• Settled the team's own role in the supply chain, a question that had been left open, and built RACI charts for series production
• Planned ramp-up volumes and spare-parts supply, and left a checklist the team owned

• Participation grew from seven to twelve between sessions — engineering, IP strategy and business development in the same room
• Both reports written and delivered in German, formally versioned, within days of each session
• A team able to hold a series-production conversation with a Korean Tier-1 on the customer's own terms
• Every session minuted with named owners and next steps, feeding straight into the following workshop

A market-readiness problem is rarely only technical. This team did not need to be told their optics were good — they needed the automotive qualification obligations, the supply-chain role definition and the cultural mechanics of the customer, in their own language, from people who had sat on the other side of that table.