Office of the Free State of Bavaria in the United Kingdom

Obviously, there is only one real Oktoberfest – and that`s in Munich every year in autumn, located at the “Theresienwiese”, which is why locals call it “die Wies`n”. 🎡💙🤍 But for one evening we created the most authentic Oktoberfest atmosphere in London for our "Business meets Brezn" event we hosted last week alongside the German Business Hub at the historic Middle Temple Hall in London. It was a fantastic blend of Bavarian tradition and cross-cultural business networking. We had many notable speakers such the German Deputy Ambassador Karl-Matthias Klause, the Lady Mayoress of the City of London Elisabeth Mainelli, the Director General of the British Chamber of Commerce Shevaun Haviland, as well as Shadow Minister for AI Lord Jonathan Berry. It was a night filled with rich conversations, refreshing old and making new connections, and a shared commitment to deepening relationships between German and British businesses.🤝 A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the success of this event, especially 👨🍳 Chef Stefan Pappert MIH C.F.S.P. - for a true and most delicious Bavarian dinner 🥨 📯 Bavarian brass band Hulzstoussboum – for entertaining us the whole evening with Bavarian vibes and music 🎺 🍺 German Kraft Brewing – for serving us their “Festbier” and managing the thirsty crowd 🍻

It was an absolute pleasure and honour to co-host the German Embassy's and German Consulate's reception celebrating the German Unity Day in Edinburgh this year. After speeches of the German Ambassador Miguel Berger, Cabinet Secretary for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture Angus Robertson and the Bavarian Office in the UK, we enjoyed the festive atmosphere at the Edinburgh City Chambers with delicious Bavarian food and a big variety of interesting guests. Bavaria and Scotland have a very strong relationship for many years - through their top class research institutions, common economical strengths such as hydrogen and aerospace, as well as many cultural links and over 15 town twinning partnerships contributing immensely to valuable people to people connections. We are looking forward to building many more partnerships and projects in the future - many thanks to Consul General Christiane Hullmann for the excellent cooperation.

We are looking back on a fabulous and successful Bits & Pretzels 2024 with the Bavarian UK Office as an official partner.🥨 We started with a welcoming get-together between the Bavarian State Secretary Tobias Gotthardt and UK startups, followed by a workshop on the Bavarian innovation ecosystem, a matchmaking tour where we introduced British startups to German corporates and investors, and finally a great stage session on the UK as a location for deep tech scale ups with Eleanor Tang-Smith Florian Schabus 🚀Nelson Wootton Miriam Ducke. We met so many brilliant entrepreneurs and stakeholders and are excited to further connect Bavarian and British innovators.💡 Many thanks to our helpful and engaged partners in Bavaria and beyond, it is always a pleasure to showcase this vibrant network👏 Katharina Kees Alexandra Schmidhuber Invest in Bavaria - The Business Promotion Agency of the State of Bavaria Carsten Rudolph Christoph Pfaff Julia Vierneisel Marisa Schneider Christoph Wirth Tina Jaeger Ann-Christin Terkowski Miriam Ducke

We are very excited to be an official partner of Bits & Pretzels Founders Festival this year and to support the UK as a partner country.🥨 This year’s motto "Kickstart Europe” highlights how important it is for the European startup community to grow even closer together in order to be internationally competitive. 🌍💻 In that spirit, we are keen to welcome many British startups and stakeholders in Munich to showcase what the UK tech scene can bring to the table and to foster dialogue between the two entrepreneurial communities. 🇬🇧🤝💙🤍 We are also happy to offer exclusive side events with advice on how to enter the Bavarian market smoothly.🚀 Please reach out via LinkedIn or the Conference App if you would like to meet up. #bits24

On Tuesday, we celebrated the Bamberger Symphoniker`s residency at the Edinburgh International Festival 2024.🎻🎺🎉 This year's festival motto is "Rituals That Unite Us" – this was also true for us, because the festival and the concert allowed representatives from all sectors to come together. The Bamberger Symphoniker enjoy a worldwide reputation and, with around 7,500 concerts in over 500 cities and 63 countries, are a true cultural ambassador for Bavaria.🥨📢 We very much enjoyed the orchestra’s fantastic, energetic performance of Anton Bruckner, Gustav Mahler and Hans Rott.👏 It was a pleasure to welcome so many distinguished guests to our reception, especially Acting Cabinet Secretary Gillian Martin, Lord Provost of Edinburgh, the German Consul General, who also kindly co-hosted this event with us, as well as several representatives from Scottish government, culture, education and economy. The wide range of guests shows once more how much Bavaria and Scotland are “unite”.🤝

Last weekend, we celebrated 70 years of town twinning between Munich and Edinburgh with a truly special concert at the New Town Church in Edinburgh. 🎶🕯The programme “Songs of Two Cities” was beautifully curated by Ian McFarlane and featured musical performances in both German and English by Jennifer Witton, Soprano, and Ben-San Lau, pianist. We were very happy to commemorate this evening together with the Consulate General Edinburgh and representatives of the Cities of Munich and Edinburgh, and the many guests in attendance.🤝🎉You can find a review of the concert by Edinburgh Music Review here: https://lnkd.in/dZmx2CHF

What a kick off to MOVE 2024 two weeks ago. 🚘🛴🚇 At our UK - Bavarian Future Mobility event, we enjoyed a variety of interesting presentations from Christopher Gruen (NovAzure), Ian Constance (CEO, Advanced Propulsion Centre) and David Wong (SMMT) who all provided some highly valuable insights into the UK mobility industry and innovation landscape for our group of innovative Bavarian companies.💡 The outlook on future UK market opportunities from batteries to connectivity and the highlighting of areas for future bilateral collaboration were very helpful.📊 We are also grateful to Hendrik Frenzel (Dromos) for sharing your experience already being active on the UK market. Thanks everyone for coming and joining us on the rooftop terrace over drinks and food to network and enjoy one of the first - almost - summery evenings together and especially to Christopher for the excellent collaboration. 🌆🥂

Many thanks to the Strategic Partnerships Office at University of Cambridge for organising the “Cambridge-Bavaria AI Conference” with us, which took place last week at the beautiful St. John’s College in Cambridge. The conference showcased not only the great outcome of the strategic partnership between Cambridge University and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), but also connected the wider Bavarian and Cambridge AI and tech ecosystem. We highly appreciated the keynotes of our two speakers from Munich, Angela-Sophia Gebert (Celonis) who highlighted the value of a diverse and interconnected ecosystem, and Dr. Thomas Meier (LMU and MCML) who gave us food for thought with his invigorating philosophical perspective on ethics in AI. Further highlights were Prof. Anna Korhonen’s presentation on AI language models as well as the high-level panel discussions on innovation and AI ethics with Xavier Parkhouse-Parker, Hendrik Frenzel and the most esteemed Cambridge Professor of Machine Learning, Neil Lawrence, and Executive Director of the Cambridge Accelerate Programme for Scientific Discovery, Jessica Montgomery, among others. Thank you to all of the participants and guests and we hope that we will soon have another opportunity to showcase the many innovative Bavarian-British collaborations in the fields of science.

Call for Application - British Deep Tech meets Bavarian Bits & Pretzels

It was a pleasure to meet so many interesting companies and stakeholders at the Bavarian British Business Breakfast on cooperation in the space sector.🚀 🛰 Many thanks to Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wirtschaft, Landesentwicklung und Energie, especially Anne Koester, bavAIRia e.V., and Tina Jaeger for organising and shaping the event with us. We learnt a lot about UK market opportunities and cooperation potential for the Bavarian space ecosystem – and had some Pretzels and Scones #bestofbothworlds.🥨🍞 We were very happy to welcome the British Consul General Mark Dittmer-Odell, who kindly emphasised the potential for Bavarian British cooperation. We were provided with the most interesting insights into the UK space ecosystem from Will Smith (DSIT) and Tina Jäger (DBT), followed by Frank Ambos (Invest Northern Ireland) and Anna Röder-Wozniak (Scottish Development International). Great overview of the different clusters and their individual strengths in England, Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.💪 Also, very exciting to learn from Robin Huber (SaxaVord) about their future plans and the upcoming launch with Rocket Factory Augsburg from the Shetland Islands this summer.🚀 The presentations were followed by a discussion about possible collaboration, particularly regarding the use of earth observation data, the powerful start-up ecosystems and the role of the security and defence sector. A trip to a conference in the UK or a delegation visit are already being considered as next steps. Looking forward to many future projects.🎉🤝