Last week we were honoured to be invited to the UK-German Department for Business and Trade organised Automotive Technology Trade Mission to ZF Group’s UK innovation hub.

Adam Huckstep shared valuable insight to the attending UK SMEs from his experience of working in Germany and with German customers, something we’ve been doing at Hypermotive with our GmbH entity in Bavaria for some time. Of the many lessons, one is to make the most of regional support networks, such as Zentrum Wasserstoff.Bayern (H2.B) and the Hydrogen Alliance Bavaria, of which we are a partner. Getting to know the local networks and expertise, along with local customs is invaluable for connecting into organisations in regions and sectors.

Jonathan Brown pitched the story of Hypermotive and the road to creating our own product family. These integrate hydrogen technologies across mobility and energy applications. Built on expertise delivering projects from the ground up to a range of customers, the commonality of task leads to a unified product approach. The value, however, is created embedding the specific expertise to play the right tune for each application at hand. This unique value within the technology is an ideal mix – known customer challenge with the coded expertise to overcome these barriers.

It was a fantastic two days on site at the very impressive new R&D facilities, with great access to the key technical and innovation leads across the UK and German ZF Group teams. There was a clear desire on all sides to learn from each other. Coupling the agility and dynamic environment of emerging technical challenges that the UK SME sector cater for so well with the ability to scale and industrialise that the German tier 1 suppliers such as ZF excel at has huge potential. There was a real buzz around all the attendees with a large number of the ZF team present across the entire event, highlighting the valuable two-way nature of this programme.

We certainly took away some exciting ideas to build on together with the ZF team. The opportunity to make new relationships with the brightest SMEs in the sector presented more possibilities too.

Thanks again to all at ZF Group for hosting, DBT and the British Consulate-General Munich team, Baden-Württemberg International (BW_i) and all the SME’s for showing up and showing off what we are capable of doing in these emerging technical landscapes.

We’re excited about what will follow…