Damjan Stamcar has spent 30 years in telecommunications, mobile and emerging technologies — at Ericsson from 1996 and with Sony since 2002. As Principal Technology Analyst at Sony Europe Limited in the Technology Partnerships Europe team, he connects European start-ups, universities and research institutes with Sony's R&D and business units in Europe and Japan.

He assesses around 500 start-ups a year across sound, haptics, AR/VR/XR, materials, sensors, robotics, AI and sustainability, and turns what he finds into decision papers for R&D and senior leadership; roughly 5% progress to pilots, partnerships or investments. He brought the audio start-up Sonical to Sony UK Technology Centre, where its UWB audio dongle went into trial production, and introduced a MEMS start-up that became a joint development and manufacturing collaboration with Sony Semiconductor Solutions in Japan. He also refers start-ups to the Sony Innovation Fund and other Sony VC teams and contributes technical input to due diligence.

Stamcar manages the Sony Research Award Program for Europe — 20–25 grants a year across 33 eligible countries — and has built more than 20 strategic partnerships with leading European universities. He has spoken at the European Innovation Council at MWC, at Cambridge, ETH Zurich and Oxford, and in the UIDP and UIIN communities on how industry and academia work together.

Before that he spent 14 years in product management, marketing and launch management for Sony Ericsson and Sony Mobile, with up to 14 smartphone launches a year in DACH and the Netherlands. He presented to Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone and Telefónica, spoke on stage at IFA, MWC and Droidcon, and served as press spokesperson for trade media, radio and TV. He began his career as a network administrator in Ericsson's GSM/UMTS test plant in Düsseldorf, working alongside his engineering studies.

A serial intrapreneur, he was Idea Owner and Business Developer in Sony's Seed Acceleration Program, from which Visilion Care emerged, and Business Development Manager DACH for the smart-office solution Nimway. He mentored student teams in the XABC University-Industry Challenge at TU Darmstadt and h_da.

Stamcar studied physics at Heinrich Heine University and electrical engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf. He is inventor or co-inventor on two granted patents and two pending applications, covering biometric authentication, blockchain-verified photography and vehicle systems. He is a native speaker of German and Slovenian, fluent in English and conversational in Spanish, and the author of the comic novel The Lobster, the Algorithm, and Other Domestic Emergencies.

His personal mantra, ancora imparo (“I am still learning”), reflects a lifelong commitment to curiosity and to never stop asking questions.