Our way from Itatiba via Piracicaba to Darmstadt

Good morning everybody here in my today`s post about our technology cooperation with the German university TU Darmstadt. But before coming to Darmstadt we need to talk about Piracicaba in the interior of the brazilian state of Sao Paulo.

In October 2018 I participated together with my Vulkan do Brasil colleagues Josias Leal (josias.leal@vulkan.com), Development & Engineering Director, Marcel Moraes (marcel.moraes@vulkan.com), Development Manager, Julio Leite (julio.leite@vulkan.com), Development Engineer, and Ferdinand Senske (ferdinand.senske@vulkan.com), VP Operations, upon indication of  my friend Mauricio Muramoto, President of the VDI Brasil (https://www.vdibrasil.com/) in the fantastic "23rd International Seminar for High Technologies" in Piracicaba, a city of 300.000 inhabitants at about one and a half hours car drive distance away from Itatiba, where our company is located. 

The "International Seminar for High Technologies" (https://scpm.eng.br/seminario/en/) is beeing organised since 1996 once per year by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Schützer from the Methodist University of Piracicaba (UNIMEP) and his team of colaborators and aims at the dissemination of information about new technologies and innovative processes. 

Prof. Schützer, due to his own scientific work experience during 7 years as researcher at the Institute of Production Engineering, Management and Machine Tools at TU Darmstadt, still has very strong links there and he succeeds every year to invite high ranking speakers from TU Darmstadt and other German universities and research institutes to his outstanding "International Seminars for High Technologies". 

One of the speakers during the event which my colleagues and I attended, was Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eckhard Kirchner, Head of the Institute for Product Development and Machine Elements (PMD). His exciting presentation under the title "From mechanical components to intelligent systems", in which he explained actual development trends in mechanical (mechatronic) engineering and the development of integrated systems of mechanics, sensors, actuators and controllers, called very much our attention and directly after his speach we approached Prof. Kirchner, presented ourselfes and showed interest in a more detailed conversation with him and his team at TU Darmstadt.

This was the beginning of our wonderful Brazilian technology development cooperation with Prof. Kirchner and his team at the PMD Institute in Darmstadt, Germany. Less than two months later Georg Martin, one of the closest colaborators of Prof. Kirchner in Darmstadt, came to our plant in Itatiba upon our invitation, where we presented to him our own development team and projects and where we identified fields of interest for a potential technology development cooperation between both parties.  

At the beginning of 2019 we signed contracts and our technology development projects started under the lead of Josias Leal and coordinated by Marcel Moraes on our side and under the lead of Prof. Kirchner and coordinated by Sven Vogel,  on the side of TU Darmstadt.

The Technische Universität Darmstadt (https://www.tu-darmstadt.de/index.en.jsp, official English name Technical University of Darmstadt, sometimes also referred to as Darmstadt University of Technology), commonly known as TU Darmstadt, is a research university in the city of Darmstadt, Germany. It was founded in 1877 and received the right to award doctorates in 1899. In 1882, it was the first university in the world to set up a chair in electrical engineering. In 1883, the university founded the first faculty of electrical engineering and introduced the world's first degree course in electrical engineering. In 2004, it became the first German university to be declared as an autonomous university. TU Darmstadt has assumed a pioneering role in Germany. Computer science, electrial engineering, artificial intellgence, mechatronics, business informatics, political science and many more courses were introduced as scientific disciplines in Germany by Darmstadt faculty.

In the next step, my colleagues Josias Leal, Marcel Moraes and I visited Prof. Kirchner, Sven Vogel, M.Sc., Georg Martin and their team of scientific researchers and students at TU Darmstadt during Abril 2019. We spent two days there for detailed discussion and revision of our different colaboration projects and we decided all next steps and activities. For us from Vulkan do Brasil this was our first visit to Darmstadt. My main reason for travelling there together with Josias and Marcel had been, to establish an initial close personal contact and nice relationship between all involved on both sides and to help Marcel, to get familiar with the new project and easen for him, to find into his new role as coordinator of all these exciting activities for us. We had a very productive and nice time in Darmstadt and made good friendship with all our cooperation partners there. 

Since then our cooperation on the different technology development subjects has advanced as scheduled and Marcel has repeatedly visited the team at TU Darmstadt and become quite familiar and experienced in the meantime with this kind of cooperation with German research institutes. 

By the way, in the meantime we have also established close contact and started several interesting cooperation projects with the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), another first class German university in the city of Karlsruhe, which is just one and a half hours away from Darmstadt. And both cities are pretty close to Frankfurt, to where we normally fly directly from Sao Paulo. Thus logistics have become very easy for us, to maintain our contact and colaboration with our friends and cooperation partners in Darmstadt and in Karlsruhe.

The above collage of pictures shows Josias, Marcel and myself together with the TU Darmstadt team. On the picture on the right side in the middle I am together with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Klaus Schützer and Mauricio Muramoto. On the picture in the lower right corner Josias Leal and I are together with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Eckhard Kirchner. 

I hope, this was interesting for You. For me it is amazing, how easily and successfully we Brazilians manage to establish contact, friendship and cooperation with such wonderful and highly experienced people and prestigious institutions so relatively far away from our small town Itatiba in the interior of  the state of Sao Paulo. 

As lessons learned I can resume, that the key factors for such success stories are undoubtedly openness, networking, friendships, iniciative, courage, risk acceptation, persistance, discipline and willingness to work hard. And another decisive factor is clearly the speed of action. Things must be made happen in short times. Today`s business (not only) world has become extremely fast and dynamic. Slowlyness has turned into a success killer. But no doubt - although things need to be done very fast, they must be done securely, in a controlled manner and without too many - and much less: repeating - errors. 

I wish You lots of fun and success for all Your today`s activities and hope, to meet with You again here tomorrow for my next post.