Scrapers
Rod seals
Piston Seals
Guide rings
Back-Up rings
O-Rings / X-Rings
Flat seals
Spring-loaded seals
Radial shaft seals
Rotary seals
High pressure seals
Sealing sets
O-ring measuring towers
Turned parts
Milled parts
Turned and milled parts
Bushes or bearings
Large format 3D printing
Post-processing of 3D printed parts
Heat-resistant 3D printed components
Plastic Components with Flame Retardancy
At the German Mittelstands-Summit in the Heidelberg Congress Center, Hänssler Kunststoff- und Dichtungstechnik GmbH received the TOP 100 Innovator Award. The award was presented by former German Federal President Christian Wulff, who serves as mentor of the competition. The TOP 100 seal recognizes something that is hard to capture in a single metric: a company’s capacity for innovation. In the scientific selection process led by Prof. Dr. Nikolaus Franke, we stood out in size category B, particularly in the category of digitalization and AI.
“Conditions in industry have changed drastically. Times of rapid change are when the decisions about innovation are made. Everything around us is moving faster — technologies, markets, customer demands. Companies that keep evolving their processes, their production, and their products as the world changes tend to come out stronger. That’s our strategy, and this year we deliberately put it to the test.”
“We see the phrase ‘That’s how we’ve always done it’ as a hurdle to be overcome with good arguments. If you want innovation, you have to win people over,” says CEO Sebastian Hänssler. The same mindset shapes how we handle failure cases. Instead of simply replacing the defective part, we analyze the entire system together with the customer: “Away from being a parts manufacturer, toward being a knowledge partner. We only create real value when we actively share our expertise and bring it into development early on,” Hänssler adds.
Trends that confirm our direction
The summit opened with a vision of the year 2030 and a robotics show. For us, it felt like confirmation. “We recognized some time ago that robotics is going to be hugely important, which is why our in-house automation engineer is putting a lot of work into it.“
Our highlight was the panel hosted by ZEIT für Unternehmer, which asked whether innovation can pull Germany out of the crisis. The consensus: yes, it’s possible — but it will take more collaborative partnerships, more speed, and a greater willingness to take risks. The panel was also fascinating on a technical level, with insights into embedded AI and an AI context model (ontology).
Our overall takeaway is a positive one. “We’re already doing a lot of things right. But we want to collaborate more with partners to get even better at AI and robotics, and to exchange ideas with innovative minds more often. Our large-format 3D printing (LFAM) in particular opens up many new possibilities, but our traditional plastics machining and the seals and plastic components it produces are also of interest to many industries,” says Sebastian Hänssler.
What ultimately matters to our customers and partners is the outcome: more stable prices and greater supply reliability, components that weren’t feasible before, faster and more transparent processes, and products with a longer service life. The award itself is a side note. What counts is what stands behind it.
More on our fields of innovation: LFAM (large-format 3D printing) · DLC coating · PFAS-free seals
