Würth Elektronik eiSos

A SMALL TALK WITH 
Alexander Gerfer, CTO, Würth Elektronik eiSos about cooperation and innovation     

1.  Mr. Gerfer, why are you involved as a Berlin-Partner?   

Our capital city representative office in the Adlershof Technology Park and EUREF Campus focuses, among other things, on developing and maintaining networks and partnerships, contact with universities, start-ups and people with ideas from all over the world. The commitment as a Berlin Partner supports precisely this focus.
 

2.  What do you like about Berlin?

Berlin is a very special place. There is a vibrant scene of young, creative minds here. Constant change, the creative vibe, Berlin as an ideas hub: these are pull factors that attract the world's brightest and most creative to the German capital. In Berlin, we establish and maintain contacts with the talents of today and the technology and market leaders of tomorrow. 
 

3.  What distinguishes your company in terms of innovation?

Clearly, cultivating relationships with start-ups. Remember: Hardly any innovation these days can do without electronics. New ideas need hardware for implementation. And it's not only start-ups that have to deal with many challenges here. The realisation of electronic assemblies, prototype construction and aspects such as electromagnetic compatibility are often underestimated. However, failure is not a disgrace, but should be an incentive. There have also been ups and downs in my personal career - for me, this is a special motivation to promote start-ups through selected technology partnerships.
We by no means see ourselves purely as a manufacturer and supplier, but rather as a partner. We see ourselves as responsible for our business location - and our living space. That is why we invest specifically in future technologies, even if their value is not yet obvious to everyone today. We are proactively committed - with free component samples and deliveries without minimum order quantities, with reference designs and advice through to design-in support. This is how we make innovation possible every day. This is how start-up ideas become market-ready products, not only in Berlin.
 

4.  What moves your company, what are you currently working on? 

We just presented a technology partnership with Organifarms at the Digital Life Design (DLD) conference in Munich. This forward-looking company has developed the prototype of a harvesting robot for strawberries grown in greenhouses. In order for robot BERRY to distinguish ripe fruits from unripe ones even in the artificial light of a greenhouse, its image recognition system needs special lighting. Organifarms built the necessary LED board with our help. Now the strawberries, which are grown all year round, can be harvested automatically - for the first time around the clock and seven days a week.
Incidentally, the fact that we are working here with a start-up from the field of vertical farming is no coincidence. We are not just a manufacturer of Horticulture LEDs. In the network of young start-ups and developers, we make many things possible: under the direction of an agronomist employed by us, for example, we gain new insights into how the variation of light wavelengths in greenhouse lighting influences plant growth and the formation of nutrients. Based on this basic research, we have developed circuits and tools for controlling light in vertical farming.

As you can see, this topic is close to our hearts. Because this space- and water-saving, pesticide-free, weather- and season-independent food production directly in urban centres is an important building block in feeding an ever-growing number of people under increasingly difficult climatic conditions. According to DLD surveys, we need to increase food production by 70 percent worldwide by 2050 - an enormous challenge that we are already facing today.
We are also continuously researching and optimising EMC (electromagnetic compatibility, insensitivity to interference) - not least because 2023 will be a year of particularly intense solar activity. It could bring us auroras in Saxony - but also damage to critical infrastructures.
To list all our current activities would of course go beyond the scope of this interview. The future will bring many new opportunities and risks. We see it as an important task to recognise them today and to develop and implement a strategy from them.