John Suh, George Kellerman and Tony Cannestra discussed the mobility sector and how investments needed to go beyond the core business.

Mark Leahy, partner at law firm Fenwick & West took the stage to interview John Suh, vice-president of Hyundai Cradle, a venturing subsidiary of carmaker Hyundai; George Kellerman, CEO and managing director at Yamaha Motor Ventures (YMV); and Tony Cannestra, director of corporate ventures at automotive parts manufacturer Denso.

All three panel participants invest actively in transport-related technologies.

Participants first shared their thoughts on changes. Suh said his company had experienced changes internally and was aware of external transformation as well: “We have been changing internally in the executive ranks and [showing] more openness to change. We have set aside quite a bit of money to invest internally as well as in startups.”

Kellerman commented: “It is about how we really reinvent ourselves to address changes in society,” explaining also how YMV was focused not only on urban challenges – mostly in mobility – but also on agricultural robotics because of labour shortages due to demographic migration of people to cities.

He added: “We have to rethink mobility and ultimately be that. You have to invest in the infrastructure. If we try to automate existing systems that are inefficient, we will make it more inefficient.”

Cannestra dived into the importance of extending the investment thesis beyond technology areas strictly related to the core business: “To step outside of our core and into mobility has been a milestone for use – such as car sharing, ride sharing and so on, and trying to understand where they are headed and see if there are opportunities for us.”

Kellerman concurred: “We are a mobility company but we are under threat by electrification and environmental regulations, so we have to be thinking forward. We have to re-think everything we do but without our core business we do not have the means to experiment with new things, so we need to protect the core.”

Cannestra also commented on the synergies provided by technologies adjacent to the core but fundamentally different from it: “There is interesting dynamics around data and who is controlling it and how to monetise it. It is tenuous for us to think we own the data but we would like to employ and know more about what we do it and do it better, if we could make better predictions about failure rates of parts, and so on.”