Dr. Klaus Schmitz

Drawing on more than three decades of experience across strategy, technology, innovation, transformation and M&A, he helps organizations understand how shifts in technology, economics, geopolitics and industry are reshaping value chains, competitive positions and business models, and what that means for their own business.

As founder of NAVAQOR, he connects each engagement with NAVAQOR’s network of partners, specialists and institutions, including Arthur D. Little, where he spent twenty years, most of them as Partner, and continues as Senior Advisor.

Focus

• Turning AI into economic advantage
• Strategy and transformation in technology-driven industries
• Technology and innovation strategy in automotive, mobility, semiconductors and energy
• Investor advisory across the deal lifecycle: commercial due diligence (CDD), technology due diligence (TDD), operational due diligence (ODD), post-merger integration (PMI) and value creation
• Innovation, ecosystem strategy and industrial transformation

How Klaus works

Every NAVAQOR engagement is led by Klaus at partner level, hands-on and without handover to junior teams.

Depending on the assignment, NAVAQOR works with selected independent experts or in collaboration with Arthur D. Little, where Klaus continues as Senior Advisor.

NAVAQOR’s network combines expertise from strategy, technology, transformation, operations, industry and academia. Klaus and NAVAQOR build each team around the challenge at hand, not around organizational boundaries.

Know why. Know where. Get there.

What he enjoys most is helping leadership teams make sense of the forces shaping their future and respond to the challenges they bring. He believes that strategy starts with understanding why the world around a company is changing, why those changes matter and why they require a response. Equally important is understanding where the company stands today and where it can create value in the future. Only then does strategy become actionable: building the capabilities needed to get there.

Technology plays a central role in many of these questions, but rarely in isolation. AI, semiconductors, geopolitics, industrial policy and the energy transition are changing industries, markets and value chains alike. The hard part is not understanding these developments, but deciding what they mean for a specific business: which choices to make, where to compete and how to execute.

AI is the current example. Everyone has access to the same models; the model is a commodity. The advantage goes to companies that industrialize it: selecting the problems worth solving, scaling proven solutions in their cheapest reliable form, and managing the bottleneck as it moves. Klaus builds and governs AI agents hands-on, so his advice on this comes from practice, not from slides.

Experience

As a student, Klaus could not decide between physics, computer science and business. Business informatics settled it: computer science and economics in one degree, with corporate management and controlling as his areas of specialization. The combination of technology, strategy and economics has shaped his way of thinking ever since. He has never seen technology as an end in itself, but as a force that reshapes industries, business models and competitive positions, and as a source of value for those who use it well.

AI fascinated him from the start. At the University of Bamberg, he immersed himself in cognitive psychology, formal logic and artificial intelligence. As part of this work, he developed a theorem prover in C++ that could do what the tools of the time could not, and it became the decisive edge in a client project. The experience reinforced a belief that still guides him today: technology creates value only when it solves meaningful business problems.

After graduating in business informatics, he spent five years as a researcher and project lead at the University of Bamberg, working with major German corporations on software engineering, multimedia systems and symbolic AI. During this period, he earned his doctorate while leading industry-funded research and development projects.

He then co-founded a research-oriented consultancy and led it as managing director for five years. Working with large enterprises, innovative mid-sized companies and research consortia, the firm advised on software architecture, model-driven development, innovation and organizational change. At the same time, he taught Strategic IT Management and Computer-Based Training as a lecturer at the universities of Bayreuth and Duisburg-Essen.

For the next twenty years, he was with Arthur D. Little, most of that time as Partner and shareholder, and for a period led the Automotive Practice in Central Europe. He advised boards, executive teams and investors across automotive and suppliers, mobility, telecommunications, software, semiconductors and electronics, defense, rail, energy and industrial technology. His work focused on strategy, innovation, digital transformation, technology-intensive M&A and value creation.

Over the course of his career, he has worked globally with clients and investors across Europe, North America and Asia, including extensive engagements in China, South Korea, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United States. He spent more than a decade supporting leading automotive manufacturers and suppliers on technology, innovation and strategic transformation, through digitalization, new mobility and electrification.

In 2026, he founded NAVAQOR.

Beyond work

Away from work, he sails. A former delivery captain, he brought yachts across open water in the dark and stormy season of the year, back when navigation, before GPS, was still something of an art. Setting a course, adapting it to changing wind and weather, and taking responsibility for a crew: at sea as in strategy, he has found few better schools of leadership.