Jaguar Land Rover has announced a new strategy through which it intends to collaborate with start-ups, scale-ups, and other firms to broaden its offering of vehicle technologies. The OEM’s Open Innovation strategy ultimately aims to find and integrate new, interesting technologies developed by companies around the world into its future vehicles. Among the technology areas Jaguar Land Rover is looking to explore through the strategy are electrification, connectivity, digital service offerings, and the metaverse.
In supporting the strategy, the OEM announced that it will develop a dedicated innovation hub in the UK – inviting start-ups around the country to share their latest future mobility innovations. While a precise location or timeline for the new facility has not yet been advised, it will be located near the company’s headquarters in Coventry, England. The hub has been established with Plug and Play, a corporate innovation platform and investor that Jaguar Land Rover is a founding partner of. The strategy will similarly support new partnerships with Cubo Itau and Firjan, both of which will work with Jaguar Land Rover to support operations in Latin America.
Based in São Paulo, Brazil, Cubo Itau hosts start-ups from the country’s fintech, agribusiness, healthcare, and retail sectors. Jaguar Land Rover will support the introduction and continued progress of the technology institution’s Smart Mobility Hub, which will work to foster and provide new automotive innovations. A private entity representing more than 10,000 firms across Rio de Janeiro’s industrial and business sectors, Firjan will work similarly to connect start-ups in Brazil developing advanced manufacturing process with Jaguar Land Rover. Likewise, it will provide these companies with access to advanced laboratories to conduct research and development programs.
The Open Innovation strategy falls under Jaguar Land Rover’s wider Reimagine strategy, through which it aims to electrify both the Jaguar and Land Rover brands before 2030. At the same time, Open Innovation will work further to support the strategy’s secondary goal to help it achieve net zero carbon emissions across its supply chain, products, and operations by 2039. Here, it will work to assist the OEM in identifying the digital services, products, tools, and processes to facilitate net zero.
The announcement of Jaguar Land Rover’s new technology-focused strategy, and its accompanying innovation hub, follows a series of new collaborations centered around vehicle technology. The most significant of these is with NVIDIA, through which it will jointly develop new ADAS functions and connectivity services on the NVIDIA Drive platform from 2025.
