Janine Härtel joins the Mobility & Automotive adoption team as a senior project manager. Since she was a young girl, Janine has driven every car she could get her hands on, old or new, no matter which brand or model. She also loves to watch Formula 1 and DTM.

Over the last years Janine could apply her passion for the automotive industry while working for MHP, a Porsche company which is part of the Volkswagen group, especially on connected car mobility services and Over-the-Air (OTA) connectivity solutions. Together with colleagues at Volkswagen, she developed the idea of the “software over the air“ PoC using the IOTA Tangle. During this time she also learned about many other opportunities to adopt DLT to the automotive world, especially for autonomous vehicles and their business models in MaaS applications. Janine has also consulted on several strategic projects in the aerospace and transportation industry, with a strong focus on IT and Engineering.

Janine studied communication engineering with a major in mechanical engineering at the Research University RWTH located in Aachen. Janine started her career in a spin off company from The Institute for Industrial Management (FIR) at RWTH Aachen, in the field of production engineering. The main focus was on developing an integration platform (myopenfactory) with a consortium of ERP providers, together with small and medium-sized and mechanical engineering companies, to reduce the complexity of intercorporate interoperability between ERP systems.

Currently, Janine is located in Hamburg, Germany.

On joining IOTA

I strongly believe in IOTA’s technology and the vision of a machine-to-machine ecosystem. Examples include vehicles paying for services on demand, such as in-car infotainment, delivery, parking onsite and offsite, driving though countries with toll roads, sharing electric power, and software updates. Most of these ideas are still at an early prototype stage, but I am proud to be part of this change. I believe it is very important to develop a solid technical layer to support all these different digital mobility services. For instance, when it comes to autonomous driving and vehicle services-on-demand, the automotive industry will need safe, transparent and scalable tamper-proof solutions to document all kinds of transactions. The chosen technologies must be reliable, and must fulfill the demands of the industry. I believe that IOTA can be the missing link between the IT and the automotive world. Ultimately I am focused on innovations and products which make mobility smarter and truly digital. Products and their UX must be developed in a way that hides the complexity of the layers underneath, so that users can enjoy a safe and hassle-free experience.

We are delighted to have Janine Härtel in our growing team at The IOTA Foundation. She has all the qualities to be a great driver for adoption in the mobility industry. Give her a warm welcome!