Mr. Kehrer, thank you for taking the time to speak with us! You are the Managing Partner of Blaier GmbH in Mössingen. Could you briefly tell us what Blaier GmbH does?

Thomas Kehrer: We are a precision parts manufacturer founded in 1995 with around 25 employees, and we specialize in custom solutions for the mechanical engineering sector. Our services include jig and fixture construction, precision parts manufacturing, the production of mechanical assemblies as well as assemblies for mechanical engineering and automation technology, design engineering, and laser marking.



You are very interested in innovative solutions and have been in regular contact with various startups for many years. In your experience, what most often stands in the way of successful collaboration with startups?

Thomas Kehrer: Fundamentally, there's often no common ground. On the one hand, startups usually have a solution that works brilliantly on paper. But there are often obstacles that young founders don't have on their radar, and often can't have. Sure, I can save enormous costs and optimize processes in a CNC machine shop with a machine learning solution. But I also have to get an experienced employee to implement it and, more or less, make his own job redundant. On top of that, a 60-year-old CNC machinist who has been programming CNC machines for 40 years isn't going to learn this anymore.

On the other hand, you could think in purely economic terms, push the solution through, and cut 30% of your production staff. But that doesn't work in small and medium-sized companies. These businesses thrive largely on the advantages of a family-like working atmosphere and the individual visibility of each employee. If you act against the resistance of your workforce, the remaining 70% will work against you. No SME owner is simply going to replace a new father who's in the middle of building a house with an AI solution. Another example is AI voices on the phone. As an SME, you can lose customers quickly that way.



Have you nevertheless been able to work with startups in the past? If so, what were your experiences?

Thomas Kehrer: Yes, very often in fact. I also have startups as customers, and those business relationships run smoothly. It gets challenging when you actually want to set up a long-term collaboration. I can say from experience that introducing software solutions, for example, is never as easy as expected. The granular problems only emerge when it comes to the actual implementation. There's always some internal issue that a startup doesn't have on its radar. That's not a problem in itself, but the process then takes longer, costs more, and it often takes a long time until everything is aligned and working. You need the motivation, the time, and the capital for that. The Mittelstand currently has plenty of other problems, but in my view, this is exactly where a meaningful, targeted collaboration with startups makes sense: to get new input and possibly a fresh perspective. The projects just have to be the right fit.



In your view, what are other reasons why a cooperation with a startup ultimately doesn't come about?

Thomas Kehrer: Mindset and language are often a problem as well. Many SMEs have "always done it this way." Old structures and clinging to tried-and-tested methods often slow down new ways of thinking. Overcoming that alone is very difficult. Nobody in a typical SME knows what a "Fullstack Agentic AI Developer" or "Cloud-Based Tokenization" is supposed to be, nor will they find out with five minutes of Googling. However great the potential added value may be, nobody will recognize it. When a managing director over 60 visits a website where everything spins as you scroll and he can't find a single sentence without English words, that's usually the end of any collaboration. Startups and established companies also differ enormously in how they present themselves. I once watched a young man in his early twenties, with a MacBook and earbuds in, explain to a 70-year-old managing director everything he was doing wrong in his company. Obviously, that doesn't work.



What advice would you give startups to help them collaborate successfully with SMEs?

Thomas Kehrer: Know the needs of the Mittelstand and understand where the problems lie. At the leadership level, the Mittelstand is still predominantly old school: the average age of managing directors and owners of small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany is over 54, and almost 40% are already over 60. That definitely makes things more difficult. But change is coming, and the next generation of managing directors is generally much more receptive to innovation. At the moment, however, innovation is moving faster than the Mittelstand. Many startups are solving problems that don't even exist yet in SMEs, because they haven't reached that stage of innovation. That gap needs to be bridged first, and that will take some time.

That's why clear communication about each side's expectations is essential. If that is taken to heart, collaborating with startups can, in my opinion, provide an innovation boost that is especially necessary right now and give your own company a competitive advantage. I am convinced that cooperation between the Mittelstand and startups can be decisive for the future viability of many SMEs, and I remain very open to collaborations.