As part of our ambitious growth plans for the future, we have appointed Silicon Valley-based Chris Crespi into a newly created and exciting Chief Technology Officer role.

A highly respected and driven businessman with enviable experience, as part of his role Chris will head up our recently established Innovation and Technology Board.

The board brings together team members from across the Cosworth business in a co-ordinated drive to identify technologies and trends that are critical for our long-term relevance and success.

As CTO, Chris will collaborate closely with the company’s senior team to pinpoint and bridge technology gaps which are pivotal to our strategy. He will also develop partnerships with academia to identify relevant technologies which, when coupled with the benefit of the Cosworth brand, will become revenue and profit streams. His remit will also extend to identifying and executing strategic licensing and acquisition opportunities.

Chris will be located in the so-called Automotive Row of Silicon Valley, providing us with critical locations in two of the world’s most strategic technology centres along with Cambridge, where most if not all the world’s OEMs have a presence.

He has a degree in electrical engineering (solid-state, microwave and quantum electronics) from the University of California at Davis, as well as an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management (Northwestern University).

“At the time, believe it or not, nobody wanted to cover tech,” Chris says. “Silicon Valley was an amazing experience.”

His extensive career includes an impressive array of international companies in high-profile arenas. He designed and marketed microwave MMICs and sub-assemblies, lasers and test equipment for Hewlett Packard Test & Measurement.

Chris worked on Wall Street focusing on the Communications Equipment Sector with companies such as Cisco, JDS-Uniphase, and Ciena. In addition, he served on the boards of public technology companies listed on the Nasdaq.

“I worked as a COO for an Artificial Intelligence company doing image scanning in the medical industry. We wanted to achieve something truly amazing,” he adds. Chris has been a trusted advisor to Cosworth for the last few years, as we head into an exciting new era.

“A while ago we had all these great ideas and concepts that were going to happen in the automotive market and, guess what, they’re not all going to happen. If you want to be there and succeed, you’re going to have to be very good at what you do.”

Read the full feature on Chris’s fascinating career-to-date and his new role at Cosworth in our latest Inspired Engineering article.