Technology and innovation
For us, progress means placing trust in people with a pioneering spirit
For 165 years, we’ve been providing answers to the challenges of our day – in the areas of healthcare, energy, industry and infrastructure. Few companies have more researchers and developers working to create innovative products and solutions worldwide. In a record number of research partnerships, our R&D employees are shaping technological progress more actively and openly than ever before.
Never completely satisfied, always looking for better solutions, taking personal responsibility for progress and blazing new trails in technology – this strategy has made us the powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering that we are today.
The latest figures confirm our power of innovation. Our R&D employees are now reporting more than twice as many inventions per day as in 2001. In fiscal 2012, we filed 8,900 invention reports, some 5% more than a year earlier. During the same period, we increased the number of our patent first filings by about 7% to 4,600, making us once again a leader in the worldwide patent statistics and No. 1 in Europe.
Our innovations impact many areas of life – transportation, industry and healthcare, for instance. Today, people all around the world rely on trains, metros and light-rail systems from Siemens to provide them with safe, ecofriendly transport to and from their homes and places of work. In industry, our product lifecycle management (PLM) software is making it possible to develop, simulate and test products in the virtual world and to model entire production processes before a single screw is manufactured in the real world. In hospitals, our innovative liver fibrosis test is enabling doctors to examine patients suffering from chronic liver disease without having to conduct time-consuming, potentially dangerous biopsies. And last but not least, innovations from Siemens are helping shape the future of energy.
In fiscal 2012, we invested some €4.2 billion in research and development.Corporate Technology (CT), our central research department, has overall responsibility for our strategic and cross-unit research activities. More than 7,000 CT experts cooperate across team and national boundaries to ensure that we maintain our technology leadership. Products with major profit potential on the world’s innovation-driven growth markets are developed and then incorporated into our day-to-day business operations. Our key research focuses today include electric mobility, sustainable urban development and next-generation biotechnology.
We’ve introduced a policy of open innovation. In more than 1,000 research partnerships, we’re facilitating targeted information exchange and cooperation with leading international universities and research institutes worldwide.
Technology and innovation – for us, that means securing our technological basis, helping shape the future with innovative solutions and strengthening our integrated technology company. The pioneering spirit of our employees is making us strong – every day and all around the world.