Driver assistance systems, electromobility, or autonomous vehicles: In hardly any other industry are digital innovations already shaping the market as strongly today and will cause such profound changes in the future as in the automotive industry. Nevertheless, more than half of all automotive manufacturers and suppliers (56 percent) currently avoid startups and do not work with them.
Only 3 in 10 companies (29 percent) develop new products or services together with startups, 15 percent support startups, for example, through funding programs. Just 7 percent purchase products or services from startups, and only 2 percent have invested in startups.
Get involved with startups!
This is the result of a representative survey commissioned by the digital association Bitkom among board members and managing directors of companies in the automotive industry with 20 or more employees.
"For the automotive industry, the motto is more true than for almost any other sector: Digital first. Anyone who wants to be in the fast lane with digitalization must work with innovative, technology-driven startups,"
says Bitkom President Achim Berg.
"The automotive industry is of outstanding importance to the German economy. The goal must be for it to achieve a global leadership position in disruptive technologies and become the driving force of the digital economy."
Automotive industry complains: Too few automotive startups
Smaller companies in particular currently lack contact with startups. Among companies in the automotive industry with 20 to 99 employees, 62 percent do not work with startups, compared to 49 percent of those with 100 or more employees. At the same time, one in three automotive companies (34 percent) say the innovation capacity of the entire industry is being hampered by the lack of automotive startups in Germany.
For this reason, the beginning of the year in Munich was also the Digital Hub Mobility As part of a nationwide initiative of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, automobile manufacturers, medium-sized companies, startups, and scientists are working together on the networked mobility of the future and developing new solutions.
Bitkom presented further results of the survey of automobile manufacturers at the start of the IAA, the results are available for download.
