'Innovative Technologies in One Place'... Hyundai Motor Group Hosts '2021 Open Innovation Lounge'

Hyundai Motor Group Collaborates with Global Promising Startups
Exhibiting Future Mobility Technologies Including Illuminated Sunroofs and Seat-Integrated Sound Systems

Hyundai Motor Group recently held the '2021 Open Innovation Lounge,' which brought together promising innovative technologies and ideas born from collaboration with global startups. Hyundai Motor Group employees are listening to explanations about promising new technologies from domestic and international startups.

Photo by Hyundai Motor Group

[Asia Economy Reporter Ki-min Lee] Hyundai Motor Group announced on the 22nd that it held the '2021 Open Innovation Lounge,' which gathered promising innovative technologies and ideas recently created through collaboration with global startups in one place.

The Open Innovation Lounge is Hyundai Motor Group's open innovation product development platform launched in 2019 to foster a creative and agile culture for product and new technology development and to quickly apply technology experiences desired by customers to vehicles through technological cooperation with external startups.

This year's event exhibited a total of 12 startups' technology development collaboration results, including 120 future technology experience scenarios imagined by Hyundai Motor Group under the slogan "Drawing Innovation and Beyond."

For this Open Innovation Lounge, Hyundai Motor Group evaluated about 300 global startups based on ▲product customer satisfaction ▲technical feasibility ▲technological originality, and finally selected a total of 12 teams: 1 team from Korea, 5 teams from North America, 3 teams from Europe, 1 team from China, and 2 teams from Israel.

Hyundai Motor Group supported all production costs and vehicles so that the selected startups could realize their technologies physically. Each startup participated in the event by implementing their technologies and ideas into actual vehicles or mock-ups over approximately 3 to 10 months locally.

The technologies implemented by the participating startups were exhibited under three main themes: ▲Expansion of Senses ▲Well-being Vehicle Space ▲Charging Solutions.

In the Expansion of Senses theme zone, the exhibits included ▲recyclable eco-friendly plant-based leather ▲Flatcore speakers applied to tailgates that can be used as sound systems during outdoor activities such as camping ▲conductive luminous paint that realizes a wider and more diverse light pattern compared to existing ambient lights ▲unidirectional light-emitting planar light sources applicable to glass such as sunroofs for lighting ▲conductive heating paint that transfers heat to various surfaces with a small amount of current ▲and smart diffusers that provide appropriate scents through odor analysis.

In the Well-being Vehicle Space theme zone, exhibits included ▲air purification solutions capable of removing carbon dioxide and humidity inside the vehicle ▲human-centric lighting that provides rest and concentration effects tailored to individual biological cycles. In the Charging Solutions theme zone, ▲solar films applicable to various surfaces outside the vehicle ▲and automatic charging robots were showcased.

Notably, Hyundai Motor Group attracted attention by sharing the preliminary development results of ▲smart glass that adjusts transparency by laminating a color-changing variable film between vehicle glass ▲and an in-seat embedded sound system that provides physical vibration and augmented sound per seat. These technologies received positive evaluations from employees at last year's Open Innovation Lounge and are currently under actual development by an internal task force (TF) team.

Hyundai Motor Group explained that technologies exhibited this year, which received high preference and necessity ratings from the customer perspective, will be reviewed for actual vehicle application after going through related procedures.

Kim Heung-soo, Executive Vice President and Head of Hyundai Motor and Kia Product Division, said, "To respond to the rapidly changing mobility ecosystem, it is essential to experimentally apply new approaches and actively collaborate with diverse and creative innovative companies. Hyundai Motor Group will play a leading role at a major turning point in mobility by actively cooperating with global startups through the Open Innovation Lounge, which operates on a 'Quick Win, Fast Fail' basis."

Meanwhile, the event has been held since 2019 to enhance the product competitiveness of Hyundai Motor and Kia. Hyundai Motor Group has been expanding technological collaboration by conducting demonstration projects that review technology scenarios of over 800 innovative global startups together with its open innovation centers Hyundai CRADLE (North America, Europe, China, Israel, Singapore) and ZER01NE (Korea), and applying some of them to actual vehicles.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.