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New Delhi: At the Germany Edition of the News9 Global Summit in Stuttgart, Shweta Kothari from News9 moderated a panel discussion on what it takes for aggressive innovation. The goal was to look for avenues of collaboration, ways to combine the scale, speed and spirit of India with the discipline, depth and design of Germany to unlock the potential of both nations. On the panel were Siddharth Bhasin, Managing Director of the German Indian Innovation Corridor, Anja Hendel, Managing Director of NXTGN Management, one of ten startup accelerators in Germany, Honza Ngo, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Blockbrain, an AI blockchain analytics platform for enterprises, and Jan-Frederik Dammenhain from Quantum Systems, that specialises in manufacturing small drones.

Hendel said “The ground for innovation is always diversity, diverse use of things, bringing different views, problems and technologies together, and then build something new. I think this is exactly where the magic happens, and that is why I am super happy to be here today. I think this is the mixture we have from startup technology ideas, academia, and also Germany, this is what the land is about. We have a good academia, but this is also what I see in India for the last 20 years since I started to work there in the early 2000s. So, you have an impressive unicorn landscape in the last few years so it is not that we have ideas here and delivery is done in India, it is really about collaboration and building new things together.”

Untapped areas for innovating in the future

Bhasin said, “We really believe that India needs a lot of manufacturing expertise at this moment, given the Prime Minister’s vision to take India to the next five trillion, ten trillion untapped opportunities that India needs to unravel. This is where a lot of German innovation can be implanted and transported into the Indian industry because if you typically look at an assessment of some German startups in Stuttgart, Munich or even Berlin, a lot of these German startups get opportunities to work with good German corporates which are primarily manufacturing companies and they do a lot of projects and POCs and venture clienting with these German companies. Given the experience that these German startups get from working in this environment of advanced precision manufacturing technologies, they could be a good transport to Indian innovation and actually empowering the innovation that India really needs, and vice versa, Germany really needs Indian digital talent and the sort of fast-paced agility that India can power German systems.”

AI, talent pool and avenues for future collaborations

Ngo said, “We actually work with Indian engineers quite a lot regarding AI because we have seen that the talent density is very high. Regarding collaboration, I think it’s really about bringing them into the culture of being part of the team but not just like a freelancer but really like having the ownership mentality, having stake, also of like regarding equity, and so they really see that they are a part of like bringing AI towards global standards.”

Dammenhain said, “We see a lot of potential in software and AI knowledge and knowhow from India and this is a very nice hook to jump into the Indian market, not only from the market perspective that there is a lot of potential, but also from the hiring people perspective, we see in diversity a huge benefit, an advantage when we look at our competitors. So diversity is the key here, even in defence topics. For sure there are some more sensitive topics you have to cover as well, security, compliance, are you willing to share everything?, which is maybe your USP in your home market and many more questions you have to think about as well, but I think diversity and knowledge India has already shown in many impressive projects. This is something we want to be part of.”